How to move from infrastructure pro to CIO

For a mid-level IT pro, it can be easy to get stuck in the server room.

Former solutions architect Justin Goff recently shared with IT Brew how the intricacies of an IT environment can lead to a heads-down workflow—one that keeps mid-level tech practitioners away from business problem-solving and, potentially, career advancement.

We spoke with CIOs and CEOs about their earlier IT roles, and the skills they needed to cultivate to prepare themselves for senior management.

Know-it-all. The “E” in CEO could stand for “everything,” according to Suresh Srinivas, CEO and co-founder of semantic intelligence platform Collate.

“You’re part of the product. You are part of sales. You are part of marketing. You are driving all sides of the company,” he said. The skills required for senior leadership are similarly wide-ranging, according to Srinivas:

• Selling an idea: Technical skills are not enough for an engineer looking to advance, he said. A mid-level pro must learn how to present ideas in a way that communicates their benefits.
• Prioritization: Knowing which projects are most important
• Building a team: Hiring leaders, especially those who have strengths you need at that moment

While those skills can’t be acquired overnight, Srinivas recommends young IT pros work to understand another important pillar of a CEO’s foundation: product development and customer support. “Just to see the decisions we make, how it actually creates either value to the customer or frustration to the customer,” he said. “That gives context to your everyday job.”

Mind your business (process). In addition to product, there’s process. Tal Carmi, deputy CIO at WalkMe, an SAP company, has spent much of his career working closely with business processes, especially in his early days as a consultant helping clients (the “business people”) implement Salesforce.

If a business leader wants a sales pro to fill out 100 fields in a form, for example, Carmi might push back on that, knowing that an associate will either speed through the documentation or not bother to do it at all.

Analyzing business problems can be helpful for the role of CIO. “Understand the end, and then potentially you can offer an alternative way to get there, which is faster or more streamlined to how the company works,” he said of an IT leader’s responsibilities.

IT pros often exist at the intersection of all departments and can see situations where processes may collide, Carmi told IT Brew. For example, if a team wants to push an initiative that negatively impacts customer support, an IT practitioner with hopes of being a leader should catch the problem ahead of time, get the parties together, and not be afraid to push back.

“How do I get different people in the organization to see me as a partner? And by definition, if you’re talking about business process and analytics and KPIs, you’re talking to meet senior management, because that’s the level where these decisions are made,” he said.

Going off on a tangent. Some of Angela McNeal’s best career transitions kicked off with a tangential opportunity outside her comfort zone. When McNeal, now CEO of AI infrastructure company Thread AI, began her IT career as a software engineer at Goldman Sachs, an engineering mentor and portfolio manager asked if she wanted to be a part of an experimental project: creating a hybrid fund that augmented traditional investments with AI-based hypotheses.

The experience introduced her to new teams, and helped the now chief executive to improve her Python coding skills and AI expertise. By the time Palantir recruiters came knocking, McNeal could share skills and experience beyond programming, like how data sets impact AI processes.

When confronted with those kinds of opportunities, McNeal said, mid-level IT pros should consider factors like:

• Does it suit your skills and areas of interest, and will it give you opportunities to expand those skills? (Maybe you’ve only done back-end work, and a new project offers a chance to develop on a full stack, for example.)
• Can you learn from the team? Are people on the team curious?

“In this life as a CEO, some very interesting sort of business opportunities have come from, just completely non-technical conversations,” she said, adding how a recent chat at an event about a new translation of The Odyssey, of all things, sparked an important connection and business contact.

A CEO also has to be ready for, well, everything.