Some recent updates
More than 1 year ago my career changed in an unexpected way, I became a CTO. Been working here for this company for more than 8 years, and in reality I did not plan for it. I did not wake up one day with a five-year roadmap pointing toward a title with three capital letters. It just happened, the way most important things in life tend to happen, quietly, then all at once.
The path here was gradual enough that it felt normal at each step. Engineer, then team leader, then department head for a few years. Each transition was mostly a wider scope of the same thing: problem solving. A bug becomes a system failure, a system failure becomes an organizational process gap, a process gap becomes a quarterly initiative. But underneath, it was still the same motion: find the problem, understand it, fix it, ship it.
Being a department head felt like the ceiling of that world. You still had your hands close enough to the technical reality. You knew what was hard and why. You could sit in a room full of engineers and talk honestly about trade-offs. When something broke, there was a reasonably clear path to what needed to happen. You carried the company’s problems, but you carried them alongside your team. The weight was shared.
CTO is different in a way I did not fully appreciate until I was already inside it.
The problems do not come with clear shapes anymore. Half of the job is figuring out that a problem exists at all, tracing something vague and uncomfortable backward until it becomes something you can actually name. The other half is getting an entire engineering organization to believe in the solution enough to actually execute it. Not just understand it. Believe in it. Those are two very different things, and the second one is much harder.
As an engineer, even as a department head, the issues were company issues. Something is broken, the company has a problem, we need to fix it. There was always some psychological distance, some separation between the problem and yourself. You cared, but it was not yours.
Now it is mine. Every systemic failure, every missed deadline, every strategy that does not land, I feel the weight of it differently. Not in a way that paralyzes, but in a way that is simply always there. It is hard to explain to someone who has not made this particular transition. The title changes something about how problems attach to you.
The harder truth running alongside all of this: I am an introvert.
I am not the kind of introvert who hates people. I genuinely care about the people I work with. But I am the kind who finds large meetings exhausting, who needs silence to think clearly, who would much rather send a thoughtful message than jump on a call. I recharge alone. I process alone. I come to conclusions alone, then share them.
The CTO role, almost by definition, demands the opposite. You are expected to be present in every room, in every conversation, in every conflict. You are the one who sets the tone, who rallies people when things get hard, who translates between the technical and the business in real time, often without enough preparation.
The day-to-day reality of this is a lot of meetings with stakeholders where you are expected to arrive with answers, or at least a direction. But the honest experience of many of those meetings is that you are guessing. Not randomly, you are making informed guesses, drawing on context and experience and pattern recognition. But you rarely have the full picture. You are asked what the next step should be for a problem that was just described to you for the first time, by someone who has been living inside it for three months. You give an answer. You try to make it a good one. And then you leave the meeting and wonder if you got it right.
What I have slowly learned is that this discomfort is not a sign that I am doing it wrong. It is just the nature of the role. The decisions at this level are rarely the ones where all the information is available. You act on partial information, stay close enough to know when to course-correct, and accept that you will sometimes be wrong in ways that take months to surface.
Introversion makes some of this harder. But I have stopped trying to become someone I am not, and started figuring out how to bring what I naturally do well into a role that did not originally feel like it was built for me. Introverts listen carefully. They think before they speak. They tend to create space for others rather than filling every silence. Those are not weaknesses in leadership, they are just quieter strengths, and quiet can be powerful if you use it intentionally.
While adjusting to all of this, one thing has been shifting so fast it deserves its own honesty: AI is changing software development, and I am not always sure what that means for us specifically.
I have been building software for over a decade. I have seen waves of hype: big data, blockchain, microservices, serverless. Most of them changed some things. AI feels structurally different. Not because of the demos, but because of what it is actually doing to the constraint that has always defined software development: human time.
The time it takes to go from an idea to a working prototype has collapsed. The cognitive overhead of switching contexts, between languages, between systems, between code and documentation, is shrinking. Things that used to require a specialist are now accessible to a generalist with the right tools and enough judgment to know when the output is wrong.
I believe this genuinely changes what makes a great engineer. Less about holding large systems in your head, less about knowing every API by memory, more about judgment: knowing what to ask, knowing when to trust, knowing what architecture fits the problem. Engineers who learn to use AI to amplify their thinking will pull ahead. That seems clear to me.
What is less clear to me, and I want to be honest about this, is the product side. Every conversation in the industry right now is about AI use cases, AI features, AI integrations. Everyone seems to have a confident answer about what their product should do with AI. I am still working mine out.
I find myself sitting in planning sessions, listening to what competitors are building, reading about what the market expects, and not always arriving at the obvious answer for our specific context. Some of the AI features I see being shipped feel like answers in search of a question. Some feel genuinely transformative. The hard part is telling them apart before you have committed the resources to find out.
This uncertainty is uncomfortable, especially in a role where people expect you to have the vision. But I think it is more honest than pretending confidence I do not have. The strategy will emerge from the work, from staying close to what users actually need, from running small experiments, from being willing to be wrong and adjust quickly.
On a personal level, AI has already changed how I work in ways that feel irreversible.
I use it to draft: technical documents, proposals, messages I want to get right before sending. I use it to explore unfamiliar codebases, asking it to explain what a module does before I read it myself. I use it to pressure-test decisions: describe what I am about to do, ask for counterarguments, check if I missed something obvious.
The introvert in me finds this genuinely useful. I can think something through with an AI before bringing it to a room full of people, which means I arrive at discussions with sharper ideas and fewer rough edges. It is like having a thinking partner who is always available, infinitely patient, and does not judge you for asking something that might sound naive.
Of course it is not magic. It is confidently wrong often enough that you cannot stop paying attention. It optimizes for sounding correct more than being correct. But used well, with that caution built in, it has made me a more effective version of myself.
I did not plan to become a CTO. I did not plan for any of this to feel the way it does.
The problems are heavier now because they are mine in a way they were not before. The meetings are harder because you are expected to know things you are still figuring out. The industry is moving in ways I am still working to understand, not just intellectually, but for the specific product I am responsible for.
But there is one reason I said yes, and it is quieter than all of the above. One day my son will grow up and ask me what I did, what I built, what I carried. I want to be able to look at him and say: I was the CTO of a fintech company with 600 employees. I was responsible for something real. I hope, when he hears that, he will be proud of his father. That hope is worth more to me than the title itself.
I am still adjusting. I am still learning. And I am trying to do both honestly, without pretending the transition was clean, or that I have the AI strategy all figured out, or that introversion stopped being a friction.
Some things you plan. Some things you grow into, one uncomfortable meeting at a time.