Welcome to CTO Levels! The framework designed to help your company understand the level your tech organization needs to operate at. This framework was designed by @Etienne de Bruin with the help of @Kathy Keating and @Scott Graves

About Us

Learn more about the story behind CTO Levels.

Terms of Use

You are free to apply CTO Levels within your organization! But check out the licenses.

FAQ

Head over here if all you have is questions!


This page is constantly being updated by the CTO Levels Working Group. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at [email protected].

<aside> 💡 Subscribe to the CTO Levels Newsletter over at Substack.

(we write about updates to the CTO Levels framework and when we add new modules and content)

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Getting Started

The premise behind CTO Levels is very simple. Go grab two numbers:

  1. the team size that reports up into the CTO (or similar executive position)
  2. the budget or expense dedicated to that team.

Now take a look at this grid and see if you can find your target level!

Level Budget People Speed Stretch Shield Sales
10 $50,000,000 400
Network
Relationships
Role
Organization
Lead Positioning
Engagements
Consulting
9 $30,000,000 200
Health
Stewardship
Hiring Pipeline
Budget
Forward Thinking
Employees Outside
8 $15,000,000 120
Strategy Expand
Competitors
Opportunities
Opportunities
Trade Secrets
Strategic Thinking
7 Strata
7 $12,000,000 100
Rewards
ESOP
Leader of Leaders
Capability Mapping
Internal / External
Hiring Pipeline
Network
6 $8,000,000 60
Product
Staff Augmentation
Execution
Organization
Application Data
Conferences Writing
5 $6,000,000 40
Psychological
Resilience
VPE
CISO
Vendors
Risk Management
Value Stream Mapping
& Cross Functions
4 $3,000,000 20
****Job Ladder
Salaries
Topology
Generative
Loosely Coupled
Empowering
Collaboration
Facilitation
3 $1,250,000 10
CD
Test Automation
Lightweight
Approval
Monitor
Decisions
Customer
Design
2 $500,000 3
Dev Process
Teams
Innovation
DEI
Learning Playbooks
Customers
Marketing
1 $250,000 2
Automated
CI
Small Batches
Experiment
****Immutable
DevOps
Adoption
MVP
0 $100,000 1
Version Control
(Trunk Based)
Unblock
Strategy
****Future Proof
Options
Decisions

What Level are you?

Let’s say you have 5 full time developers, 2 QA engineers, 1 support person and one product manager that all report to you as the CTO. This would put you at 9 people and therefore your company would be at a Level 3.

Check out all the levels here:

Levels

How we determine each Level’s Blocks