You don't have a leadership problem.
You have an identity problem.
Every technology leader sits in one of three buckets. Most are in the wrong one. Moving between them has nothing to do with acquiring new skills. It requires something far harder: letting go of who you believe you are.
This is the conversation most technology leaders have never allowed themselves to have.
You got into technology because you love what it can do. Because you think in systems. Because there is a particular satisfaction in building something from nothing, in shipping something that did not exist yesterday, in solving the problem that had everyone else stuck.
That identity, the builder, the engineer, the craftsperson who speaks in logic and precision, is what got you here. It earned you the room. It built your reputation. It made you excellent.
And it is also the thing standing between you and the leader you are capable of becoming.
Not because technical skill doesn't matter. It does. But because the way you identify, the story you tell yourself and others about what makes you valuable, determines everything about how you show up. What you prioritise. What you avoid. What you believe you're there for.
Right now, for most technology leaders, that story is the wrong one. And the world is moving fast enough that the cost of getting it wrong has never been higher.
Three buckets. One shift that changes everything.
Every technology leader, at every stage, is operating from one of these positions. Where you sit is not a judgment of your intelligence or your worth. It is simply a starting point, and the beginning of an honest conversation about where you need to go.
Output
You deliver things. Features shipped. Tickets closed. Systems running. Your value is measured in what you produce, and someone else decides what gets produced.
- You respond to what others define as important
- Your language is "we shipped X"
- You're measured by velocity, volume, and uptime
- Someone else holds the vision; you execute it
- Your expertise is your currency and your cage
Outcome
You deliver results. Not just features. Real business impact. You understand why you're building before you build anything. You've started speaking the language of the business.
- You define what success looks like before you start
- Your language is "we achieved X"
- You're measured by results, not activity
- You translate business problems into technology solutions
- You're at the table, but still executing someone else's strategy
Impact
You change trajectories. You don't execute strategy: you create it. You don't deliver outcomes: you design the conditions that make outcomes inevitable for everyone around you.
- You shape what the business becomes, not just what it builds
- Your language is "we created something that mattered"
- You're measured by what you make possible in others
- You see around corners the business doesn't know exist yet
- You are the strategy, not its executor
The shift from Output to Impact is not a skills upgrade.
It is an identity transformation. And most people cannot make it alone.
The hardest thing you'll ever do is stop being what made you great.
You are brilliant at what you do. You know more about the systems than anyone in that room. You see the problems before they become problems. You carry more technical context, more architectural nuance, more genuine expertise than any other leader around the table.
And that. Right there. That is the trap.
Because as long as your identity is rooted in being the most capable technologist in the building, you will keep showing up as a technologist. You will be drawn into solving technical problems instead of business problems. You will lead with your expertise instead of your vision. You will keep accepting the output order instead of writing the impact agenda.
This is not a flaw in your character. It is what your entire career has rewarded you for. Precision. Depth. Mastery. Systems thinking. Being right. These are celebrated in technology. They are the identity markers that earned you credibility and respect.
But at the level of leadership you are called to, or the level you want to reach, they are no longer sufficient. The business does not need you to be its best technologist. It needs you to be the person who determines what technology makes possible for the business to become.
That is a different job. It requires a different frame. And it demands a different answer to the question: "What am I actually here for?"
Four truths that are uncomfortable to sit with
Not because they're harsh. Because deep down, you already know they're true.
Your technical excellence is making the shift harder, not easier
The better you are at the craft, the more the organisation pulls you back to it. And the more you let it happen because being needed feels good. Technical mastery becomes the justification for staying in Output when the business desperately needs you in Impact.
You think you're in Outcome. You're probably in Output.
Most technology leaders self-assess one bucket above where they actually operate. You might be defining success before you build, but are you defining what the business should become over the next three years? That is a categorically different thing. And most people have never been asked the question clearly enough to know the difference.
Even being in the right bucket is no longer enough
Even if your archetype matches your business stage, and you're operating at the right level for today, the expectations of every level are shifting faster than any career has had to adapt before. What counted as Impact two years ago is Outcome today. The bar is moving, and it is not waiting for you to be ready.
Reading this and feeling it changes nothing by itself
Insight without accountability reverts. You will finish this page, feel the recognition, and walk into your next meeting operating exactly as you did before. That is not a failure of intelligence. It is how identity works. The shift requires more than awareness. It requires an environment designed to make the shift possible.
AI won't replace your job.
Someone who has made this shift, and who works with AI, will.
The world is actively redrawing your job description. Are you in the conversation?
There is a debate happening right now in boards and executive teams around the world about the CPTO (the Chief Product Technology Officer). About whether the CTO and CPO positions are converging. About whether technology leaders who don't deeply understand product are still fit for purpose at the top of the house.
That debate is not academic. It is a signal that the business world is forming a new view of what technology leadership should be responsible for, and that view is firmly at the intersection of technology, product, and business strategy. Ones and zeros are no longer enough. The expectation is that the technology leader owns more of the outcome than ever before. And in many organisations, that expectation is already here.
Then there is AI.
You live in a world of precision and logic. That world is your home. It is being reshaped at extraordinary speed by a technology that can perform many of the things your career has been built on, at scale, at velocity, without a salary review.
If you're in Output: AI is already replacing significant parts of what defines your value. Code generation, architecture patterns, infrastructure automation, documentation. The things you were once indispensable for are now accelerated to the point of commoditisation.
If you're in Outcome: AI sits alongside you doing the execution, which raises what's expected of you to justify your position. The outcome bar rises. The expectation is that you now deliver more, faster, with a smaller team. And because AI does the heavy lifting, your contribution must be increasingly in the thinking, the judgment, and the leadership.
If you're in Impact: every board, every investor, every CEO is now asking what your technology function delivers relative to what AI makes possible. The question of human leadership value is being asked at every level of the organisation. Including yours.
The only sustainable position, the only one that is genuinely difficult to replicate, is one where your value is unmistakably human. Where you are the person who sees around corners. Who builds the room others want to be in. Who transforms a technology function from a cost centre into a competitive advantage the business hadn't imagined.
That is not a position you can fill from Output. You can barely fill it from Outcome. It demands Impact. And Impact demands a different identity, one most technology leaders have never been required to build.
The season has changed. Not gradually. All at once.
What was true about technology leadership three years ago is being rewritten. These are not predictions. They are observations.
What Was
The CTO's value was in technical depth. Knowing the stack. Making the architecture decisions. Being the smartest engineer in the room who also went to executive meetings.
What Is Happening
AI is commoditising technical depth. The CPTO debate is redefining scope. Boards want strategy, product intuition, and business acumen, not another senior engineer with a C in their title.
What Is Required
Technology leaders who identify as leaders: people who create vision, build capability in others, and drive business outcomes through technology. Not leaders who happen to understand technology.
Why this shift cannot happen in isolation
Understanding the problem has never been the hard part. The hard part is that identity shifts require conditions that are almost impossible to create for yourself.
You need mirrors
Your patterns are invisible to you. The ways you revert to Output when pressure arrives, the language you default to when talking to the board, the decisions you take back instead of delegating. You cannot see them clearly from inside them. You need someone who can.
You need accountability
Insight without accountability reverts to habit within days. Not weeks. Days. The identity you've built over a decade does not shift because you had a conversation or read a framework. It shifts because someone holds you to the new version of yourself long enough for it to become real.
You need to be vulnerable
The identity shift requires admitting that what made you great is not what will make you great next. For most technology leaders, people whose careers have been built on being right and being certain, that is one of the most genuinely difficult things there is. It requires a space where that vulnerability is met with respect, not risk.
This is not a commentary on your capability. It is a recognition of what makes identity-level change genuinely hard. The most capable people you know are not the ones who figured it out alone. They are the ones who created the conditions, the relationships, the accountability, the forcing functions, that made the shift possible.
The best technology leaders in the world did not become who they are by reading more books. They became who they are by finding the environments and the people who believed in the next version of them before they could see it themselves.
Timothy J. Hitchens
Creator of the Become CTO Methodology · 6x CTO across 7 countries · 7 years at Amazon across Asia Pacific · 15 years of research across 80+ organisations
I built this methodology because I lived these shifts myself. And because I watched too many genuinely capable technology leaders get stuck at the wrong level, operating from the wrong identity, wondering why the work wasn't landing the way it should.
If any of this has landed for you and you want to have an honest conversation about where you are, what the methodology says about your situation, or just to think it through with someone who has been there, reach out. I'm genuinely happy to talk. No agenda. No pitch.
linkedin.com/in/hitcho