Dear CTO,

I need to tell you something that might sting: your CEO doesn’t care about your code.

No one cares whether that button was built with HTML, Flutter, React, React Native, or native iOS/Android—as long as it works, reliably, every single time someone taps it. I know that might be hard to hear, but it’s the truth. Your CEO doesn’t wake up thinking about test coverage, CI/CD pipelines, or whether your architecture is beautifully modular. They wake up worrying about payroll, churn, runway, and whether the sales team has enough momentum to close this quarter.

And this is where we, as CTOs, often fail. We walk into boardrooms armed with diagrams that look like circuit boards, latency charts, and words like “refactor,” “tech debt,” and “observability”—and then we wonder why the CEO’s eyes glaze over. Of course they do. We’re speaking a language that isn’t theirs. We’re explaining the engine when they need to know if the car will get them to the destination—and how much the fuel will cost.

If you want to bring value to your CEO, stop talking in tech. Start talking in money. In business. In outcomes.

⸻

Speak Impact, Not Implementation

Think of it like this. If your dentist tells you, “We shaved two millimeters off a cavity,” you smile politely and wait for them to finish. But if they say, “We saved your tooth—no $5,000 root canal needed,” suddenly you care deeply. Same truth. Different framing. One is technical. The other is consequential.

When you improve page load time by 200ms, don’t tell your CEO about milliseconds. Tell them about the users who didn’t drop off, about the $1.2M in revenue that stayed in the funnel because conversion went up 3%. When you clean up a tangled subsystem, don’t say “we reduced complexity.” Say, “New engineers can now ship features in a week instead of a month—that’s worth fifty thousand dollars in savings per hire.”

Your CEO doesn’t need to understand how the system works. They need to understand what happens because of the system. And money, growth, and risk are the only language that sticks. If you can’t translate your technical work into one of those three, you’re not speaking their language. You’re just muttering in the corner.

⸻

Tech Debt Is a Home Loan, Not a Credit Card

Here’s another mistake I see you make over and over: waiting for crisis. You push features, debt piles up, the system starts creaking like an old ship, and then one day you announce: “We need to stop everything for six months and rewrite this.”

That’s not leadership. That’s neglect dressed up as a rescue mission.

Engineering is hygiene, not surgery. You brush your teeth every day so you don’t end up in the dentist’s chair begging for an implant. You service your car so the engine doesn’t blow out on the highway at 90mph with your family in the back. You don’t ignore the small stuff until it becomes catastrophic. You handle it quietly, consistently, as part of the routine.

Technical debt is the same. It’s not a credit card bill you clear in one painful, soul-crushing shot. It’s a home loan. You pay it in installments. Predictably. Steadily. Quietly. Bake it into every sprint, every quarter. Twenty percent goes to resilience, to refactoring, to reducing friction. Not as a special event. As hygiene.

Your CEO doesn’t want to hear about open-heart surgery. They want to know you’re brushing your teeth daily and paying the mortgage on time. That’s how you earn trust. That’s how you avoid the emergency.

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Empathy Goes Both Ways

But let me remind you of something: empathy goes both ways.

You roll your eyes when your CEO says, “Just ship it faster.” You complain they don’t understand the complexity, the tradeoffs, the reality of building software. But here’s my question for you: do you really understand business?

When your CEO says “faster,” it’s not because they’re naive or careless. It’s because they’re carrying the weight of investors breathing down their neck, employees relying on the next funding round, competitors shipping faster, and customers threatening to leave. Every delay isn’t just about code to them. It’s risk. It’s revenue. It’s survival.

If you can see that—if you can step into that pressure instead of resisting it—you stop sounding defensive. Instead of saying, “You don’t understand how complex this is,” you can say, “I understand why you need speed. Here’s how we’ll give you velocity without blowing up the engine. Here’s the tradeoff, and here’s what it’ll cost us if we skip the brakes.”

When you show empathy, you usually get it back. Your CEO isn’t the enemy. They’re under pressure. Speak their language. Acknowledge their reality. Then show them the path forward.

⸻

The Greatest Value Is Often Invisible

Here’s the thing about being a great CTO: your greatest value is often invisible. The deal that didn’t fall apart because the system didn’t crash during the demo. The customer who didn’t churn because performance quietly improved. The engineer who didn’t quit because the environment was sane, not a dumpster fire.

You don’t get headlines for these things. There’s no medal for “disaster that didn’t happen.” But your CEO feels them. They feel the absence of problems. They feel the confidence of not having to worry about engineering while they’re on a call with investors or closing a deal. That quiet trust is the real reward.

Stop waiting for permission to maintain the system. Stop asking if it’s okay to pay down debt. Just do it. Bake it in. Make it routine. And when you do, translate the outcomes: “We reduced onboarding time for engineers by 40%. That saved us six weeks per hire.” “We improved uptime to 99.97%. That protected $800K in annual revenue.” “We refactored the payments flow. That means we can launch in three new markets this quarter instead of one.”

Talk sense. Talk business. Talk money.

⸻

Your True Value

So, dear CTO, here’s what I need you to hear: your CEO gives you freedom, but that freedom comes with responsibility. Don’t squander it by hiding behind jargon, diagrams, and excuses. Stop waiting for permission. Earn trust by making outcomes visible. Pay debt down like a home loan. Keep hygiene daily. Translate every decision—every architecture choice, every refactor, every hire—into revenue, growth, or risk.

Because when you do, you stop being the person who slows things down. You stop being the “no” person. You become the person who makes ambition real. The person who enables velocity. The person who sees around corners and prevents disasters before they happen.

Talk money. Talk business. Talk outcomes. Not tech.

Because when you do, you stop being misunderstood. You become indispensable.

And that’s your true value.

⸻

In summary, here’s what I need you to internalize: Speak impact, not implementation. Translate your technical work into revenue, growth, or risk—the only language that resonates with CEOs and boards. Treat tech debt like a home loan, paying it down steadily and predictably, not in one catastrophic rewrite. Show empathy for business pressure—your CEO isn’t asking for speed because they’re naive; they’re balancing survival, competition, and investor expectations. Make your value visible by connecting engineering wins to business outcomes. And above all, talk sense, talk business, talk money. When you master this, you stop being the person who slows things down and become the partner who makes ambition achievable. That’s the real role of a CTO.

Your’s truly

Scarred/Slapped/Wise CTO