You’ve got 40 engineers and a real budget, why are you still leading like it’s 12 people and a whiteboard?
The Real Reason You're Feeling Buried and Edge of Burnout Might Be Because You Haven’t Upgraded Yourself to Match the Scale of Your Company
You know the feeling.
You’ve scaled the company, added headcount, expanded budget. But you’re still drowning in Slack threads, triaging bugs, rewriting JIRA tickets, and jumping into sprint planning like it’s your job to personally hold the engine together.
It’s not that you aren’t working hard. It’s that you’re working at the wrong level.
I’ve been that bottleneck.
The one staying up past midnight, rewriting queries. Stuck in sprint planning. Jumping in to “help” with architecture. Holding the whole system together with duct tape and caffeine.
Back then, I was leading a fast-growing company with a budget that screamed “scale”... but I was running it like we were still scrappy. My team had grown. My influence had grown. But my leadership model hadn’t.
I didn’t need more time. I needed to level up how I thought, acted, and led.
That realization led me to create the CTO Levels Framework.
When I took on a post-acquisition CTO role, my experience would carry me. I’d scaled teams. Built products. Led engineers.
But I found myself buried in rework, sprint drama, and infrastructure messes that weren’t mine, but were now mine to fix.
I was the most senior technologist in the room, but I wasn’t leading. I was reacting. And my CEO felt it.
One day, in frustration, I sketched out a simple triangle: Revenue at the top, Budget and Tech below it. That triangle became a grid. That grid became a pattern. And that pattern revealed the one truth I couldn’t ignore: I wasn’t leading at the level my company needed. Not because I couldn’t, but because I didn’t know what that level actually looked like.
That’s what the CTO Levels Assessment gives you. A mirror. A map. And a model to grow into.
At 7CTOs, a leadership community and coaching platform for Chief Technology Officers, we help tech leaders navigate exactly this disconnect.
You might be running a team of 40 with a $6M+ budget, but many CTOs at this level are still making decisions as if they have a $500k budget with a 3 person team to solve tactical problems, jumping into sprint planning, and firefighting outages.
Everything feels urgent. Everything feels behind. Everything depends on you.
You don’t need more hours in the day. You need a different operating system.
That’s the gap the CTO Levels Assessment fills.
We don’t ask you where you think you’re operating.
We assess where you should be, using the CTO Levels Framework, grounded in budget, team size, and operating maturity.
For example, at Level 5, a CTO should focus on organizational resilience, building psychological safety, developing a trusted “right hand” like a VP Eng or CISO, and leading beyond tech, into compliance, vendor strategy, and true cross-functional alignment.
But instead, we often uncover red flags from Level 2, foundational issues that should’ve been resolved three levels ago:
No reliable CI/CD or deployment process
Fragile or inconsistent DevOps practices
Undefined or ineffective MVP strategy
Lack of lightweight, repeatable development processes
Weak connections between engineering work and customer outcomes
A team that’s growing, but not yet forming into a cohesive unit
At your scale, these shouldn’t be your focus anymore, but they’re still quietly holding you back.
What’s really happening?
You’ve scaled your team and budget, but not your leadership model. You’re still optimizing for hustle instead of systems. You’re operating like it’s a startup, but your company has already outgrown that.
This misalignment breeds stress, mistrust, and missed opportunities.
You’re stuck solving symptoms instead of root causes.
Your CEO can feel it. Your team can shoulder it. And you probably do too, when everything depends on you, and you’re the bottleneck.
But don’t stress about this realization.
Like the famous saying, "The truth will set you free." Once you name the gap, you can fix it.
Pearl Meyer’s 2024 research shows small firms spend 41 times more per dollar on leadership than large ones1
That’s a clue: at scale, your job isn’t to do more. It’s to lead differently.
The CTO Levels Assessment shows where your leadership is out of sync. It’s not a personality quiz or abstract theory.
It’s 11 levels, each with four critical blocks, scored red, yellow, or green. Once you know what’s red, you can stop guessing and start building what your company actually needs and deserves.
Because real growth means scaling you, not just your team.
You don’t debug everything manually. You build the observability. You don’t answer every question.
You build the observability. You write the playbooks. You empower your team.
Same with leadership.
You’re not a startup anymore. Your team isn’t small. Your leadership can’t be either.
Here’s what changed everything for me:
Once I stopped trying to out-hustle my company’s growth and started matching it with a new leadership operating system, everything shifted.
Meetings became more strategic. The team made decisions faster without me. My CEO started trusting my plans instead of questioning my pace. And, the key part, I started enjoying the job again.
The CTO Levels Assessment is your mirror. It won’t flatter you. It’ll show you the gap. But then it’ll show you what to build next.
Take the 1-minute CTO Levels Assessment.
Just two numbers, your team size and estimated allocated budget, and we’ll show you exactly where the gaps are, and what to focus on next.
Your company isn’t leading like it’s small anymore. Why should you?
And if you’re feeling like I once did, overworked, indispensable, and a little alone, know this:
You’re not failing. You’re just due for an upgrade.
After you take the assessment, reply back and tell me what you discovered. What hit home? What are you going to build next?
I want to hear. I really do.
https://pearlmeyer.com/insights-and-research/advisor-blog/definitive-data-on-executive-cost-ratios.