I too have had those roles, starting my career as an IC, then a middle Manager, then a consultant, then a CEO/founder, and now a CTO. What I’ve focused on is how to help my teams and then my company operate as efficiently as possible while spending our resources where it benefits our customers the most.
Some examples of decisions I’ve made:
- IT/engineers won’t spend time building and maintaining email servers, we’ll spend $5/month/employee on G Suite and use their time on things that make our products more valuable
- We won’t outsource support even though that would dollar for dollar be more efficient, because understanding and building empathy for the customer is more important
- no we won’t spend money on email lists, but yes we will spend money on tools that allows our outbound sales team to more quickly determine prospects that fit our ideal customer profile
- bringing finance in-house much sooner than other people recommended because being more efficient at Accounts Receivable, Renewals, and thus cash flow allowed us to grow faster than we otherwise would have
- paying for a third party SSO solution for our products and instead using engineering time to build first class integrations between our products and complementary products, because having an artisanal SSO System doesn’t benefit our customers
> IT/engineers won’t spend time building and maintaining email servers, we’ll spend $5/month/employee on G Suite and use their time on things that make our products more valuable
In-house email servers are not constrained by the time to build them, but rather by reputation/spam considerations. Sorry, but that's a lucky guess ;-)
> paying for a third party SSO solution for our products and instead using engineering time to build first class integrations between our products and complementary products, because having an artisanal SSO System doesn’t benefit our customers
That's one of vendorlockiest vendor lock out there, which is a very YOLO decision.
The idea that buying stuff is more efficient then building it yourself is at the cornerstone of the modern economic theory, but that's only a theory.
In the wilds there's much, much more factors to consider then just comparing cost of building versus cost of buying.
Of course there are more factors. We are not blindly outsourcing everything to services and we are equally not blindly building everything in house. Those factors often come down to core competencies and “best and highest use” of time. These will vary by company. Case in point: lots of companies use highcharts and D3 for charting. why? Because building and maintaining a world class graphing system is not their core business and doesn’t meaningfully advance their business. And outside of a small minority of companies building your own charting from Scratch does not provide a meaningful advantage for your customers or over your competitors.
Deciding what is core and should be in house and what is not is hard and it’s only partially a technology decision. It’s primarily a business/market decision and being able to do those is a mark of a good CTO.
I'd venture to guess that for the tools and services that you buy, you weren't sold them, you sought them out and bought them because you recognized a need to buy vs build. I'm not saying don't buy things. I'm saying, if you're being successfully sold to in this fashion then you likely have more fundamental organizational problems.
My Dad told me something when I was little that stuck with me:
"You never see ads for broccoli"
Of course while that's not strictly true (weekly grocery flyer) his point was that, if you actually need something to survive you'll figure out how to get it without having to be sold to.
If you don't know what you need, what chances do you have to make a right decision, especially talking to people who are interested in selling you stuff?
I don't see how there is any alternative to researching stuff first in order to know what you need, especially if we are talking about "efficiency" and "value" which are not rigorously quantifiable.
Some examples of decisions I’ve made:
- IT/engineers won’t spend time building and maintaining email servers, we’ll spend $5/month/employee on G Suite and use their time on things that make our products more valuable
- We won’t outsource support even though that would dollar for dollar be more efficient, because understanding and building empathy for the customer is more important
- no we won’t spend money on email lists, but yes we will spend money on tools that allows our outbound sales team to more quickly determine prospects that fit our ideal customer profile
- bringing finance in-house much sooner than other people recommended because being more efficient at Accounts Receivable, Renewals, and thus cash flow allowed us to grow faster than we otherwise would have
- paying for a third party SSO solution for our products and instead using engineering time to build first class integrations between our products and complementary products, because having an artisanal SSO System doesn’t benefit our customers