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Your First 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering

Whenever I transition to a new opportunity, I think about how to “start well.” How can I ramp up as effectively as possible? How do I balance the urge to “show value” immediately with making the right decisions?

For my next role transition, happening later this month, I wanted a set of tactical best practices for starting as a Chief Technology Officer or VP of Engineering, so I did some research and collected these recommendations. The act of identifying the specific goals is part of the learning process, but you could imagine measuring team execution using both “number of experiments run” and the productivity metrics from Accelerate. If you haven’t previously had a strong recruiting or recruiting-oriented engineering leader, then it’s possible that there simply isn’t an existing process to work from, in which case you’ll have to lay out the pieces from scratch.

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