Picture this: Friday evening, release freeze, charts spiking red. Ten years ago you’d yank a chair, crack open Vim, and slog through the night. Today, as CTO, you watch the chaos from a dashboard—and your mouse hovers nowhere near ‘merge’. Does that feel weird? It did for me too, until I learned how to steer storms without grabbing the wheel.

Why hold on to the technical compass?

Because growth hides landmines. McKinsey found that poor architectural calls shave up to 14 % off EBITDA in high-growth firms. (Yes, finance sat up when I dropped that stat.) Keep your compass calibrated and you’ll spot trouble before Finance sees the red ink.

Daily practice: “One diagram, one data point, one debate”

1. One diagram – I ask a lead to walk me through any system via Miro for ten minutes. No prep, scribbles welcome.
2. One data point – I pull a single metric from Grafana, ask “Why this trend?” If nobody knows, we log a follow-up.
3. One debate – Fifteen-minute Slack huddle on an open decision: language choice, shard strategy, you name it.

That 30-minute ritual keeps me closer to the metal than most execs who lurk only at QBRs.

Big swings: Bet, measure, brag

Last year we took a bet on ARM-based instances. Price/perf looked tasty—until our Java services hit weird GC stalls. We ran a week-long A/B: x86 vs ARM, 4 % CPU variance, no user pain. Savings: about $210 k annually. You better believe I flashed those numbers at the next board meeting. Pride? Oh yeah. More important: the org saw that technical boldness still lives at the top.

Snapshot of recent bets

• GraphQL gateway – 2.8 × query fan-out drop, dev velocity up 17 % (survey)
• Rust sidecars – trimmed tail latency 22 % on batch jobs
• OpenTelemetry roll-out – cut MTTR from 2 h 14 m to 58 m

Guardrails: Three rules I never break

1. No surprise tech stacks – Any language not already in production triggers a 2-page RFC, period.
2. Latency budgets are product features – If you blow the budget, you fix the feature scope, not the SLA.
3. Post-mortems go org-wide – Blame-free, names redacted, lessons shared.

Sticking to clear rules keeps the culture consistent even when head-count doubles.

Keep learning personal

I build small things no one pays for: a TypeScript script to auto-sort my reading list, a AWS CLI that parses cloud bills. Shipping tiny side projects scratches the maker itch and reminds me why I got into tech in the first place.

Talk to customers, not just code

Last month a client mentioned the iOS app felt “sticky” on poor networks in Nairobi. That single chat kicked off a review of our mobile caching layer and shaved 400 KB off first-launch payload. You can’t spot that from Jenkins logs. Pride hits hard when you turn a casual complaint into a smoother experience for thousands.

Parting thought

Stepping back from the keyboard doesn’t dim your tech flame; it lets you light torches for the whole crew. The code will keep compiling—your job is to keep the compass steady, the bets smart, and the pride shared.

So tomorrow morning, run the “one diagram, one data point, one debate” exercise. Give it two weeks. See how much sharper you feel—and watch how quickly your team starts to seek your viewpoint before they hit merge.

By Gurpreet Singh

Keywords: IT Leadership, IT Operations, IT Strategy

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