Marketing Your Value as a CTO

Highlighting your accomplishments & marketing the value of you and your team is an underrated skill for many technology leaders.

In fact, most executives with a technical background are actually pretty bad at this.

CTOs, VPEs and other technical leaders tend to be quieter, more self-effacing and deferential compared to their peers in the business, such as those in Sales or Marketing. These folks are frequently much better at showcasing their value to the rest of the organization.

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Here’s an example: I joined a business that was historically very heavily influenced by Sales, and the Board asked me to shift the culture to be more technically innovative to compete better in the market. So, I gave a speech to the technology team one day in which I said something to the effect of, “it’s your code in the end that our users are leveraging.”

This was a simple and true statement. And of course, the crowd of developers loved it.

But when folks in other parts of the business heard about it, they were less than happy. There was lots of grumbling about why engineering was “taking all the credit.”

Why the grumbling? Because for years it was all about Sales & Marketing and no one thought much about the value Engineering was bringing to the table.

But this wasn’t the fault of Sales or Marketing.

Instead, it was engineering leadership being weak at highlighting the value they were creating for the company and its customers.

In fact, by not developing their skill at marketing their value the engineering leaders accidentally made the culture dangerously lopsided.

Why Master Talking about Your Value?

If you have doubts as to why marketing your value and the value of your team within your organization is an important part of being a CTO, let me break it down for you.

These are the 5 reasons why as a CTO or Technology Leader you absolutely must master this skill.

5 Reasons to Market Yourself & Your Team

1. So the lopsided scenario I noted above doesn’t happen; great companies are usually well balanced between the influence of Tech vs. Sales
2. So your team is recognized, feels valued and ultimately has some say in the direction of the company
3. So that your seat at the executive table has meaning and you’re not invisible in terms of strategic decision making
4. So that you are able to attract the right talent to the Engineering Team both inside and outside the company
5. Because budget & resources are important, and if stakeholders don’t know your teams value, you may not get enough resources to do your job

Prerequisites to Marketing Your Value

There are 2 key prerequisites before you can effectively highlight your value and the value of your team to the rest of your organization.

#1: Knowing What Value You’re Creating

First, you actually have to know specifically what value you and your team are generating for the business. A lot of technology leaders miss this right off the bat — they can’t seem to articulate the value they create in a way that resonates with business stakeholders. But if you can’t execute on this piece then forget about being able to market yourself or your team in the right way.

Let’s look at an example: a VP of Engineering in my org once worked incredibly hard with a group of his developers and deleted vast amounts of troublesome and sensitive PII data that was putting the company at risk.

When he reported this up to the CEO & ELT he said with excitement, “we deleted several terabytes of unnecessary user data!” The CEO had no idea what a terabyte was, so he simply nodded his head. In fact, no stakeholder outside of tech really knew what the value of the VPEs data deletion project was.

Of course, the real value was reducing the risk of a severe security incident on the business, but that’s not what the VPE said.

Nailing down the value you’re generating in a way the rest of the business understands clearly is the first prerequisite.

#2: Tracking Value Creation

Whether its yearly strategic goals set by the business, certain success metrics, or OKRs, you must continually track the value you and your team are creating over time using some kind of tool or mechanism.

This is not as easy as it looks, and entire methodologies have been developed for this kind of tracking. If your business doesn’t have a formal system in place like OKRs then create something in Excel to begin with.

Your goal is to establish a log / history of all the value you and the team are generating no matter how great or small. But keep in mind, “value” is a subjective concept and what you as CTO/Tech Leader think is important may not be important to the rest of the business.

The solution is to keep a well-balanced history of the big accomplishments and value you’ve generated across multiple factors like: impact to the business, product impact, engineering impact, innovation impact, customer impact, etc.

Only a multi-dimensional approach will suffice when tracking the value you create over a period of time.

How to Market Your Value

With those prerequisites out the way let’s run through how to properly highlight your value to your organization.

Here are the key techniques that I suggest you follow:

• No matter what send your boss a list of your key accomplishments at the end of every year; keep the list to 10 items or less and make sure they include strategic wins & business impacts your boss will care about
• Recognize the successes of your team in the appropriate forums; for example, highlight the Engineering Team wins at least once a quarter in Product Steering Committee or Executive calls
• It should be rare, but you can send an all-hands email once in a while talking about a big success the Engineering Team has had as long as the impact to the business was significant
• In 1:1s with your boss highlight small wins, a particular person, a team or a project success every month so that they are aware of the great work your people & teams are doing
• Capture and send an email internally to the Engineering Team once a quarter listing out all the big accomplishments and their impact on the business, this will help everyone get comfortable with tracking their own success; you should also discuss these wins in key meetings with Engineering leaders
• Periodically, you can also post a big accomplishment to on outside forum such as LinkedIn. However, there are optics around these public forums that need to be managed, so always be careful
• Look for ways that Engineering is helping your peers and their departments and then in your 1:1s with these peers / leaders showcase one or two value creation activities every few months
• If there is a system in place like OKRs make sure to keep them updated! This is crucial. Don’t fall into arrears because this is a critical way to market yourself: by hitting your OKRs!
• Never denigrate or become unnecessarily humble about yourself or your team; there are plenty of people who need and deserve recognition (including yourself).

Closing Thoughts

There’s an art to highlighting the value you create to the rest of your peers and broader organization.

Most CTOs and other Technology Leaders don’t know this art. If you can master it, you will substantially differentiate yourself as a leader and strengthen your team in the process.

But practice makes perfect with this, so you must start using some of the techniques noted above as soon as possible.

Keep in mind, you’re not trying to brag. You’re simply showing value. There’s a difference and as you develop your skill at this, you’ll learn the sweet spot for yourself & your company culture.

For most leaders this means mastering the techniques discussed above and becoming more vocal. It really doesn’t take that much effort. Just a bit of a mindset shift and not being so shy about highlighting the successes of your team.

Plus, if you’re not doing this for your team and yourself no one else is going to do it for you!

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