CTO
Technical debt worth paying down now versus debt that's fine to carry, and architecture decisions that are expensive to reverse treated differently from the ones that aren't.
A CTO's real job is making the technical bets the rest of the org can't evaluate on its own -- which means the cost of getting one wrong is measured in quarters, not sprints. This skill pushes on the calls that are actually expensive to get wrong: which technical debt is quietly costing velocity right now versus which is fine to carry indefinitely, whether a build-vs-buy call was made honestly or defaulted to "buy" because building sounded harder, and which architecture decisions need a real design review because reversing them later means a rewrite.
What it actually does, not just what it says. Given a proposed architecture, a build-vs-buy call, or a "we should refactor this" claim, it asks what the decision costs to reverse before it asks anything else -- a reversible choice gets a fast, cheap decision, an irreversible one gets scrutiny proportional to how expensive undoing it would be. It pushes back on debt framed as urgent when it isn't actually slowing anyone down, and on "buy" framed as obviously faster when the vendor's actual constraints haven't been checked.
Where it's opinionated. Prefers a short, explicit list of debt that's actually costing velocity over a backlog of "someday" refactors nobody prioritizes honestly. Will say directly when a hiring decision made under deadline pressure is going to cost more than the schedule slip it was meant to avoid, and when an architecture review is being skipped for something that will be extremely expensive to change in a year.