The No-BS Guide to Being a Great CTO with Zach Goldberg
What separates decent CTOs from great ones? It’s not coding chops or architecture diagrams. It’s people—and the ability to lead them.
In a recent episode of Commit & Push, host Damien Filiatrault talks with Zach Goldberg, CTO of Gruntwork and author of The Startup CTO’s Handbook, about what really matters when you’re scaling an engineering team. From avoiding overcomplicated tech to investing in developer experience, Zach brings hard-earned, no-fluff advice for technical leaders navigating the chaos of growth.
Start With People, Not Tech
According to Zach, too many CTOs focus on the stack when they should be focused on their team.
If you’re not hiring well, everything else falls apart. Zach breaks down the foundations of smart hiring: define success before the job post goes up, create a structured interview process, and remove ambiguity around promotions. Your org shouldn’t be guessing what growth looks like.
That also means knowing when not to hire. Contractors can be a powerful option—if you’re solving a short-term or niche problem. The key is intentionality.
Skip the Sparkle. Build What Works.
When it comes to architecture, Zach’s advice is blunt: don’t overengineer. Don’t fall for hype. Don’t build microservices unless your scale demands it.
“If you’re not sure, go with the monolith.”
Simple, stable architecture is a force multiplier. It makes onboarding easier, deployments faster, and debugging less painful. Choose the tools your team can use today—not the ones you might need tomorrow.
AI Isn’t Magic—But It Can Be Useful
Despite the buzz, AI isn’t replacing engineers (yet). But it is changing how they work.
Zach highlights tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor, which are speeding up development cycles and improving productivity. But the core responsibilities—understanding the business, making strategic trade-offs, designing resilient systems—still belong to humans. For now.
Want to Scale? Fix Your Dev Experience.
You don’t need a 10x engineer. You need a team that isn’t bogged down by friction.
Zach points to the “outer loop” problems—slow builds, clunky CI/CD, inefficient tooling—as the silent killers of team velocity. Even a 10-minute delay per day per dev adds up to weeks of wasted time per year.
Fixing these bottlenecks is one of the highest-leverage things a CTO can do—and one of the most overlooked.
The Real Job of a CTO
A lot of engineers think being CTO means being the best coder in the room. Zach disagrees.
“Your job isn’t to ship code—it’s to build a team that can.”
That means aligning engineering with business goals, making high-impact decisions, mentoring your leaders, and constantly refining how the team works. Great CTOs aren’t just technical. They’re organizational architects.
And yes—getting a coach or joining a peer group can make a huge difference. You don’t have to figure it all out alone.
Final Thoughts
Zach Goldberg cuts through the noise with a simple framework:
- Hire great people
- Keep your architecture boring
- Use AI where it helps
- Optimize dev workflows
- Level up as a leader
Technical leadership isn’t about chasing the newest frameworks or shipping features faster than anyone else. It’s about building systems—and teams—that can scale without breaking.
About Zach Goldberg
Zach is the Chief Technology Officer at Gruntwork and the author of The Startup CTO’s Handbook. He’s helped scale multiple engineering orgs and is also an executive coach for other tech leaders. At Gruntwork, he leads infrastructure-as-code development and the team behind Terragrunt, a popular open-source tool used by thousands of developers.