Blog

Managing Tech Tems with Insights

Six months ago I introduced Swarmia into our engineering ecosystem—not out of curiosity alone, but out of need. As I reflected in The CTO Playbook, when a tech te...

You need a technical co-founder. You don’t have the budget. Now what?

If you’re building a product in a complex industry—pharma, finance, or anything heavily regulated—you probably already know the challenges. You’ve validated the need, you’ve spoken to potential users, and you might even have a working prototype. B...

API and AI: How modern integration transforms ecommerce

The development landscape has evolved significantly in recent years, and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are now central to how modern systems communicate. This is especially true for businesses looking to harness the power of AI. APIs s...

What Developers Really Do: A Peek Behind the Keyboard

Ah, developers. The mythical creatures who type fast, drink coffee like it’s an Olympic sport, and somehow “fix computers” for their friends and family. But what do they really do all day? Let me paint you a picture—spoiler: it’s way more...

Musks leadership style versus The CTO Playbook

A few years ago I wrote "The CTO Playbook" (available on Amazon). I extensively went in to leadership sty...

When the AI lies to you

When the AI "lies" to you

This month we are happy to share not only sunshine stories on how cool the AIs are, but also when it doesn't work. It truly shows that the LLMs are really not any "AI" (yet) and it's in its infancy, read more and...

Hiring developers: why cultural fit beats technical expertise

Hiring developers can be a nightmare

Especially if you're a non-technical founder. You’ve probably heard terms thrown around that you barely understand, like “full stack,” “Kubernetes,” or “REST APIs,” and you might think, “I just need som...

What The CTO Playbook say about agile

In The CTO Playbook, Robert Mejlerö provides a comprehensive look at Agile, focusing on its core principles and practical implementation.

He highlights the Agile Manifesto, which emphasizes individuals and interactions over processes and...

Struggling with Tech Decisions? Here’s the AI Every CTO Needs to Know About

Benefits of Using the "CTO TMC Advisor AI" for CTOs and People Working with Developers

In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, CTOs and those working closely with development teams need reliable, actionable insights to drive technology...

Navigating Tech Leadership: 5 key areas to focus on

Stepping into the shoes of a tech team leader can be both exhilarating and daunting.

Whether you're a CTO, a product manager, or someone newly responsible for guiding a team of developers, the complex digital landscape requires an understa...

Forbidden words list

Throw out the old ways, in with the new.

Let’s stop comparing those apples and oranges. 

A common language is what keeps us understanding each other. So when we speak about certain business terms, we may use words for one thing...

Social Media

Online presence – what to write and what to share

As the CTO, or any other person with a separate title responsible for tech teams, you are a spokes person for the company in a way, and what you share and do on social media like LinkedIn i...

Board presentations

A story is better than a thousand KPI’s

As with all other chapters, I start with a slight existential question. Are you regularly invited to report to the board?

Some organisations still think that their CTO’s are IT managers, or a s...

KPI’S and OKR’s

Don’t measure what you can't control

Once upon a time when I worked as an Engineering Manager I was asked by the CEO to report on certain KPI’s in order to measure and control performance of the development team.

We had KPI’s (Key Pe...

Budget

How a stable budget work helps you be geared to run a great team

Owning your own budget could really help you and your team to be able to work efficiently and to the point.

The beauty of budgets is that they are decided once per year...

Project Updates

How to communicate what’s being worked on, what’s going to be worked on and what’s done

People either directly involved in your project or product or affected by the outcome of your activities will need to be continuously getting status up...

Communicating

Sharing your company communication over Slack isn’t really that uncommon

In this remote working world — where many teams are spread out doing “home office”, we really need to communicate harder, better and smarter. I’m no communication exp...

Time Off

Do you want to spend time approving leave requests?

Trusting your employees to effectively manage their own time is a game-changer. Let everyone decide their own working time, when to take time off and how to manage and handle their own wo...

Coding

99% of developers would not call Software development “coding”.

We input instructions in a file, which is interpreted by another program on the server, returning back a result. That’s it. Coding is indeed the art of telling the “computer”...

Feedback

They beauty of working with others is that they experience things about you. And users experience a lot using your product.

What's harder in life than hearing something you have been working on or been a part of is not working to another p...

Build or Buy

SaaS or develop yourself?

The classic question that you have heard so many times, in so many shapes. Now, slightly adjusted for our purpose I will discuss some thoughts around the topic.

If you want to build the most expensive to...

Innovation

An innovation process. An oxymoron.

On one axis you have innovation, the other side process. They are their own complete opposites. There is no innovation in a process.

We follow its steps, and any attempt to bypass, go outside the b...

Motivation

Culture eats Strategy for breakfast

Before even touching the topic of motivation, I’d like to talk about some very important prerequisites I think needs to be there. Trying to motivate people without having great leaders is like try to mak...

Avoiding micro management

The biggest threat to self-managed employees who would like to get a higher sense of inclusion and has an inner drive.

Accountability is an interesting word. It means “the fact or condition of being accountable; responsibility”. Google say...

Working remote

The last two years has proven that “work from home” is here to stay, and is already the default way of working in the future

Home office, as it was called before, has been around for a long time. At least for developers it was great to be...

Collaboration models

Let’s visit some interesting collaboration models and how they have been working out.

Spotify are famous among developer circles for their collaboration model. At the time it came, it was something new and fresh. Built on agile principles...

Forming

When a new team gets together, there are certain dynamics at work. Understanding these basics helps you understand what’s going on.

You have managed to get the entire team to that team offsite. The trip in went well and everyone have arriv...

Leading developers

Is working with developers and tech projects any different than leading people in other areas?

Here we go thru topics such as leadership styles and basic ways of how to work with people in a way that is inspiring, motivating and is support...

Computers and Security

Infrastructure, antivirus, azure, office 365, drive, client management — all those IT tasks.

Is IT-management a part of the work as a CTO? Sound more like something under the wings of a CIO – but in reality in smaller companies the CTO cou...

API’s

Get data from other sources using API’s.

Finally something fun! Application Programming Interface (API) is the way to connect different systems with each other. Is it plug and play as in you just click and it's done? No way. 99% of all API...

Development process

How to get something from idea to done using a standard development process.

There are many different Development processes. I’ve worked with Waterfall phasing, scrum with sprints which releases all at the same time once done as well as Re...

Incident Management

When the shit hits the fan

Late Friday evening, just when you are about to sit down for that family dinner, the phone buzzes and you get notifications from your favourite monitoring service that the website is down.

You excuse yourse...

Monitoring

Keeping all your applications properly monitored makes it easier to understand if they are up or down.

Astonishingly many online services are not monitored and this has the obvious effect that no one knows when they are working or not.

Data

You capture a lot, but why do you need it?

Data is important and if interpreted in a way that makes sense, it could help your company to take the right decisions.

During the recent years there has been a lot of new regulation regardi...

Documentation

At the right level at the right moment

Bring out your favourite pillow because it’s time for some discussion about everyones most boring topic — documentation. Believe it or not, in the beginning of dev times this was a true and an importa...

Prioritising

What should you focus on now? I’m going thru some ways of creating value thru setting the right priorities.

Switching focus in the middle of the task is the worst thing for most developers, and perhaps also other employees. As a CTO or any...

Maintaining the code

Git, Pull Requests, Quality, Workflows, Four-Eye-Principle, Prettify

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Devops are important to maintain code but guess what this is also a team effort, and on top of that it’s also a business critical pr...

Devops

The important work of maintaining servers, environments, code bases, version and all to enable developers to work.

Development Operations. This guild that few knows the essence of. Is it just a developer fixing some automatic release scrip...

Testing

Well, you don’t want obvious bugs. Releasing fast doesn’t mean we need to release things that breaks the application or looks bad.

To test something before release is a good idea. Testing is as with everything else — a big topic and there...

Frontend & backend and their Devs

What happens in the browser, stays in the browser.

We divide code in Frontend and Backend. Not really for fun, but because of a reason. In order to understand basic Software Architecture, we need to understand the split between frontend an...

Programming languages vs Frameworks vs Stacks

Here we are discussing programming languages, frameworks and stacks.

Software development in the context of this book means building an application that is used in the web browser. Or, in some cases, on your phone as an installed “app”. Read more about Programming languages vs Frameworks vs Stacks

Build a product

From idea to working product that actually is solving something for someone who’s paying for it

As you read in the Starting a Project chapter, building a project is all about trying out the idea fast and see how it’s received, then bu...

Starting a project

Let’s go from zero to hero by looking at the pieces needed for a Project that becomes a Product that becomes something useful.

You are going to build a great product, but I got news for you. It all starts as a project. It’s fine. We can ca...

Planning

Plan the Kanban product development

We need to talk about plans. One of the biggest misunderstandings about Agile is that you can’t plan. It's not true. You just can’t make detailed long term plans that must be followed and be super strict...

Agile

An intro to the basics of true agile. 

The word “agile” can be heard in meetings and seen in presentations. There are many misunderstandings and it would make sense to discuss these, however let’s start with the agile basics.

In...

What to focus on

Business first means business first.

Beautiful code or just working code? Maintaining code or building new features and increase sales? Adhere to the development process, continuously remove technical debt, prettifying code or keeping the...

Off-boarding

Remove access, conduct interview and close down all accounts when someone is leaving – and drink the grave beers.

Removing access to systems is important, and should be done the day after the person leaves the team. Here, it's also a good...

Firing

About bad apples and how to throw them out. That's a clickbait title for you and has nothing to do with the content of this chapter.

One person in your team is not delivering. There’s a lot of subtile messaging in that sentence. Let’s dig...

The three types of CTOs

When you are looking for a CTO - do you need the hands-on-CTO, the business project manager-CTO or the experienced tech lead and people leader-CTO?

Abbreviations - we all love and hate them. We love them because they are easy to remember a...

Outsourcing

You want in-house developers sitting next to you?

If you look at job ads for developers, they are “usually” pretty much alike. There is an intro about what the company do, then some role info and some perks. Most also states that there is...

Asking ChatGPT about AI ethics and opportunities

Dear ChatGPT - what's the current status of AI?

I asked the latest hype – our new companion ChatGPT from OpenAI.com what it thinks about ethical concerns...

Agile basics

What's agile all about?

Being a big topic ten years ago - fast forward til today - is it still interesting? Yes, very much. And no, the basics didn't really change.

Agile product development is a method of creating and delivering pro...

What to pay

What is the time from someones life worth?

The topic of salaries and renumeration is a huge topic that deserves its own book. My take on it is that people should be paid fairly, to their market “value” and “enough”. 

Up to a cer...

Onboarding

Getting new developers up to speed and give them a warm welcome.

One thing is for sure. You will be doing this activity together with new people joining your company many times. No matter how much don't want people to leave and you are tol...

Hiring the right people

Getting the right people on board is as hard as it sounds.

Having the right people on the team is of course very important. But who are the right people and where can you find them? Not so easy.

Finding your future coworkers takes a...

Developers on an equity model

Are you bored at work?

Working within technology for almost two decades, I've obviously met a lot of developers. There is much to be said about all the great people I've had the chance to work with – but in this post I'd like to focus on s...

The CTO Playbook

New book out!

The art of developing an application has been well described in various coding books that you can find gathering dust on almost all developers desks around the world. This is not that book. There may be some technical referen...

Hyro becomes Juice

It’s with great joy that we can announce that Hyro has become part of Juice, a new and innovative recruitment platform.

Announcement: The danish recruitment platform called Hyro will be closed and moved to Juice. Hyro was an algorithm-base...