It’s that time of year again that a lot of companies are conducting annual performance reviews.  One question that we’ve heard often, albeit in various forms, is “what is the path to the top technology position in the company?” 

At a high level, the chief technology executive within a company is most often either someone who has proven him/herself in the technical ranks or someone who has proven him/herself in the business and has some technical acumen or knowledge.

Unfortunately, the path alone does not determine success and you can see this from the rate of turnover in chief technologists in so many companies.   The reason for this turnover we believe is that there are so very few chief technology executives out there with all the right skills, attributes and characteristics to make them successful in their job.  Success in their job is predicated on the ability to speak to both the business and to the technologists implementing the business through software and systems and in so doing to get the right things to happen to create shareholder wealth.

“Path” then is less important than the experiences that you gain along the way.  The right question is not how to get in the chief technology executive’s office, but how to get there and be successful such that you can make a positive difference in shareholder wealth.  Whether you come from primarily a business background or primarily a technology background we suggest that you have the following skills and/or experiences:

1)      Good knowledge of your business and of business in general.  This is important for several reasons, but the most important reason is your ability to communicate with and understand the needs of the business associates in marketing, product, etc.  You must be able to both understand what they are saying and be able to communicate in THEIR language.  You are the bridge to the technology and you should not expect that they are going to understand “engineer speak”.  While it’s not absolutely necessary that you get an MBA, it is generally a good idea that you take business classes and learn the basics of marketing and finance for example.  With respect to knowledge of your specific business, ideally you will have spent time as an engineering or product manager and/or time as an analyst, manager or individual contributor within one of the business units in your company.

2)      Great technical experience.  This is the one area that can truly test the capabilities of a business person-come-technologist without a technical degree or specific hands-on technical experience.  We’ll address this one more in future articles, but for the greatest chance of success we believe it is important that just as the chief technology exec needs to be able to speak the language of the business, so must they be able to speak the language of the technologists.  We recommend time as an individual contributor within one of the many areas of technology (software engineering, infrastructure, operations, QA, etc) as well as time managing more than one discipline within the team. 

3)      Great leader.  Too many of us fall down here quite frankly.  The aforementioned points really deal with one’s ability to communicate (i.e. that he/she “speak the right languages to the right constituents”).  But that alone really won’t get thing