Thirteen months ago I joined Wasteer as Head of Engineering. Last month I became CTO. Here's what actually changed and what the title means at this stage of the company.
What changed in thirteen months
The engineering team is different. Not in composition, mostly. In how it operates. When I arrived, the team was capable and constrained: capable people operating in a structure that suppressed judgment. Thirteen months of clear ownership, shorter decision loops, and genuine accountability have produced a team that makes decisions confidently and escalates appropriately. That's the most significant change.
The product-engineering relationship is different. Engineering is now in the room when product decisions are made. Not to veto. To ensure technical consequences are visible when decisions are being made rather than after they're locked in. The roadmap is more technically honest than it was. Surprises mid-quarter have become unusual.
The system reliability is different. When I joined, incidents were reactive events that involved everyone and took too long to resolve. We now have proper monitoring, defined incident roles, runbooks for the common failure modes, and a post-incident review process that produces actual improvement. P1 MTTR has gone from hours to under 45 minutes consistently.
What the CTO title means here
Different at every company stage. At an early-stage startup, the CTO is often the lead engineer. At Wasteer, at this stage, the CTO is responsible for the engineering organization's strategic direction: what we build, how we build it, and whether the technical capabilities match the business ambitions over an 18-month horizon.
The distinction from Head of Engineering is roughly this: Head of Engineering is responsible for the engineering execution being excellent. CTO is responsible for the engineering strategy being correct. The day-to-day execution responsibility shifts to the leads who have developed under the new structure.
There's still hands-on technical work. Architectural decisions at significant inflection points, technical due diligence on potential partnerships, representing the engineering reality to investors and board. But the center of gravity is outward-facing and strategic rather than inward-facing and operational.
What the thirteen months required
Being right often enough, consistently enough, that the organization developed trust in engineering judgment. This sounds self-evident. It isn't. Technical leadership is earned incrementally through decisions that work out. The promotions are the lagging indicator.
Developing the leads. The team's capacity to operate independently is directly proportional to the quality of the people with ownership. Investing in those people, giving them space to make decisions and learn from them, is the thing that makes the CTO role possible at scale.
Staying honest with the leadership team about what engineering can and can't do. The organizations where technical leadership erodes into irrelevance are usually the ones where the CTO started telling the leadership team what it wanted to hear rather than what was true. The conversation is harder. The trust is worth it.
What I'm watching
Whether the team continues to develop when I'm less operationally involved. The real test of the organizational structure isn't how it works when I'm paying close attention. It's how it works when I'm not.
With gusto, Fatih.