Book release
If you follow me on LinkedIn, you may have seen the post about the release of The CTO Field Guide book. I want to break it down a bit more:
About 8 years ago I had the opportunity to share what I've learned when I moved from engineering to management career through a mentorship program from Endeavor. That extended to people and companies looking me up directly.
It was a free space to talk about mistakes, successes and learnings. I've shared how I learned to hire, grow teams, face challenging technical issues and market changes. We discussed product and engineering culture under different kinds of business in a way that would be hard with a single day job.
I can't recommend enough to leaders to look for mentoring and later on provide them. I did that pro bono - and still do it - had a host of engineering managers for a newly acquired company looking me up for help on how to get onboarded, startups in different stages and so on. What I got back was too precious to put a price: an open forum, collaboration and learnings of scenarios that I'd take many professional lives to learn.
I took a lot of notes and saw that many situations were common and repeated across different companies. I've started to blog these notes and ended up creating an ebook hosted in my Github account called "The CTO Field Guide" - a pun on my favorite reading when I was a kid, electronic field maintenance books. I wanted to create a handbook for my job.
In the pandemic the volume of companies and individuals reaching out grew exponentially and I reached more than 100 sessions. From these, 7 companies started a 2 quarters (6 months) track to support their leadership. The learnings of this period along with the notes I took helped me expand and improve the ebook to the point that I wanted to try self publishing.
I'm not exaggerating. For some reason or another I started to have from 3 to 4 one hour slots every week reserved for these requests. Some of them extended for more than one session, some would offer to pay me (and I declined if it was not a complete program). Some of them even used this free offer to help run a reorg and at least two to support delicate changes as CTO and CPO replacements. I think it happened because I was available - you didn't had many options locked inside after a day of work.
My objective is that the book helps from the tech lead to the seasoned CTO. It is a work in progress that may finish by June 2022 but I decided to put it on sale now and ship updates as they come because there is a lot of useful content already.
If you are curious to see what goes on mentoring sessions, if you are just starting a new job, team or if you got promoted, this is the book for you too. The website to learn more and get the book is
I got pretty confident with the material I already have in the book and decided to shorten the release cycle and open a Gumroad account to sell it. I still have plans to expand it on org design and more teams layouts but there are enough actionable points that may be useful for tech leads and CTOs.
I've self published to learn more about being in control of my own books - I've already published two books in Portuguese and they went well but I had little to no control about the process. Having played on bands in my teenage years I likened that to recording and pushing out a Demo Tape so it seemed the right thing to do.
You can find the book at:
Hope you enjoy it.