Ask HN: What makes a good CTO for a mature startup?

Hello HN! I'm developer from a mature (+6 years in business) Latin American startup and I was asked by one of the founders to describe what would be a good CTO for our company.

Our former CTO left the company one year ago to start a new business and the role wasn't covered after that. We have a really good and mature team but founders and some of us (developers) are worried of some key problems that are arising in the area.

To describe the actual situation and where I think that a CTO can help us:

- Developer speed and delivery of new features decreased. Mainly because we are doing refactors and dealing with tech debt. We need someone that helps us decide when to focus on features and when it makes sense to deal with tech debt.

- Clear tech stack strategy: - New problems are resolved using different strategies and there is no one defining and thinking in a common tech stack. Sometimes one team decides to go with Google Cloud functions and Typescript and the other one uses Go. Monolithic? Microservices? Monorepo? Multirepo? And all kinds of questions are arising.

  - Someone who thinks and helps with the decision of what platform is better for our business based on our current team and capacities (Android app? Progressive? Ios?)

- Developer career - A real career path for developer is not defined and no one has a clear idea of what it is expected from us to be promoted.

- Resolve testing - We need a QA team? We need to invest more in automated testing infrastructure?

What do you think am I missing in the list?

What is important and what is not for the role?

Who is the person in the company that needs to interview and validate skills for a CTO? I think that I can help here but I will eventually report to the interviewee.

How important are technical skills for this role?

Any hints or recommended lectures can help! Thanks