Table of Contents
Role Based Path - CTO
This guide is for CTOs who need a clear, executive-level view of engineering health, delivery predictability, and where to invest next. It highlights the highest-leverage places to use LinearB to ali…
This guide is for CTOs who need a clear, executive-level view of engineering health, delivery predictability, and where to invest next. It highlights the highest-leverage places to use LinearB to align delivery reality with business priorities, while keeping metrics focused on system improvement — not individual scoring.
Time Required: 8–12 minutes to orient, 20–30 minutes to set an exec cadence
Difficulty: Easy
TL;DR
- Use Metrics → Delivery to track org-level flow trends and variability.
- Use Teams → Iterations (Retro) to understand planning stability and unplanned work patterns.
- Use Surveys and Developer Coaching (if enabled) to add human and workload context to delivery data.
- Scale low-noise standards with gitStream where consistency matters most.
- Use AI Insights (if enabled) to accelerate leadership narratives, then validate against the underlying trends.
Overview
At the CTO level, your focus is consistent outcomes across the organization: predictable delivery, healthy engineering systems, and measurable returns on platform and AI investments. LinearB helps connect planning data with real Git activity so you can guide strategic priorities with evidence.
What you likely care about
- Where are the biggest system constraints across teams?
- How confident should we be in our current delivery commitments?
- Is unplanned work consistently eroding capacity?
- Do we need enablement, platform investment, or policy changes?
- Which standards can we scale without adding process overhead?
Where to spend time in LinearB
Metrics → Delivery
- Look for cross-team stage bottlenecks and high variance.
- Prioritize trends over snapshots.
Teams → Iterations (Completed)
- Review planned vs. delivered patterns and carryover themes.
- Watch unplanned and unlinked work signals that reduce predictability.
Surveys & Developer Coaching (if enabled)
- Use sentiment and workload/knowledge signals to explain delivery trends.
gitStream (if enabled)
- Scale org-level PR hygiene and low-noise guardrails.
Additional Areas to Prioritize
Investment, allocation & cost capitalization (if enabled)
At the org level, speed is only part of the story. You also need a defensible view of where engineering effort is going and whether it matches strategy.
- Resource Allocation uses FTE to break down effort across projects, epics, initiatives, issue types, and other configured work units (Jira and Azure). Use it to validate whether actual investment matches your planned priorities.
- Investment Strategy adds a category-level view of how development effort is distributed so you can track strategic balance over time.
- Cost Capitalization (if your org uses it) helps reduce manual finance reporting by categorizing capitalizable vs. non-capitalizable work by your reporting structure.
Review these trends monthly and before quarterly planning.
If you are aligning engineering with finance or annual planning, review these trends monthly and before quarterly prioritization.
Recommended CTO operating rhythm
- Monthly business review
- Quarterly planning / budget alignment
- Ad hoc risk reviews when trends shift
Recommended next articles
How did we do?
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