CTO · VP Engineering · Head of Engineering
CTO Bottleneck: Five Decisions Route Through You
Routing every directional call through the CTO worked at 20 engineers. At 80 it is why the roadmap slips, why your VPE is drowning, and why your calendar reads like an escalation queue. A better calendar does not fix it; clearer decision rights do.
The bottleneck seat is one of the six situations CTOs bring to me most often. The work is unglamorous and it compounds fast.
The situation, from the inside
Architecture review at 10am. Senior hire at 2pm. PIP escalation at 4pm. And my VPE just Slacked me about a contractor budget I do not have context on. Every directional call routes through me. That worked at 20 engineers. At 80 it is why nothing ships and my VPE is drowning.
You have probably tried
- Telling your VPE "you can decide this" (he brought it back)
- Blocking Fridays for "deep work" that got Zoom-invaded
- Reading Amazon's "one-way vs two-way doors" (helpful, not applied)
- Delegating to a director who then delegated back
How we tackle it
Decision-rights matrix. Not RACI, more specific: which decisions your VPE owns outright, which you sanity-check async, which need a live call. Then we install escalation criteria so the team knows when to interrupt you and when not to.
Target: By week 6: 30%+ of the decisions that used to route through you no longer do. Your VPE is not drowning. Your Fridays exist.
Working it 1:1
Bi-weekly 60-minute sessions, weekly while the fire burns. I have sat in the seat: built Mews into a $2bn+ unicorn from 8 to 80 teams, led engineering at Manta before IBM acquired it, and spent 4+ years in the Bay Area as Principal Software Architect at Databricks. The pattern data comes from 3,400+ unique sessions with engineering leaders in 17+ countries. Rated 9.17/10 on average across 300+ reviews.
Pricing is public: 430 EUR per session, 361 EUR per session for ELC members, or 2,580 EUR per quarter (6 sessions over 3 months). You only pay for a session you rate 7 out of 10 or higher. Full pricing.
Related reads
The other situations CTOs bring
- The board wants a delivery number →
- First 90 days in an inherited org →
- Technical due diligence before a raise →
- AI adoption pressure from the board →
- A sounding board without politics →
All six, plus the questions CTOs ask most: CTO coaching & mentoring