A weekly practice for CTOs
Friday, 4pm.
Close the slack. Open a notebook.
The CTO Notebook is a weekly reflective practice organised around four sentinels: Speed, Stretch, Shield, Sales. Twenty minutes. Four questions. One page.
The point isn't to capture everything. It's to notice the same four things every week, so the patterns surface.
The four questions
“What shipped this week?”
“What shipped slower than it should have?”
A note on velocity, told by the work that finished and the work that didn’t. The first question is easier than the second.
“What did the team learn this week?”
“Where did we duck a learning opportunity?”
Capability is built from chosen difficulty. Notice the moments you steered the team around something hard, and ask whether that was the right call.
“What risk did I close this week?”
“What risk did I let drift?”
Most risks drift in silence. Name them while they’re still small. The shield is the sentinel that asks for honesty about what you’re postponing.
“What revenue conversation moved because of engineering?”
“What stalled?”
Engineering doesn’t sell. But every engineering decision either unblocks a deal or quietly puts another week on the deal clock.
What you do with the answers
The practice has a job. Three of them, actually.
- On Monday
Pick one open thread from the page and put a date on it. Carry it into standup.
- Each month
Roll four weeks of notes into a sentinel status. Green, yellow, red, blue.
- Each quarter
The patterns become the briefing. Three months of honest notes write the executive narrative for you.
Coming next
The notebook is the practice.
CTO Compass is the engine.
CTO Compass turns these four prompts into a monthly cycle, a quarterly briefing, and the dashboard that earns its keep the night before the board meeting. It opens later this year. Save a seat.