Brilliant post.

I joined a unicorn EdTech at the time of COVID and I wished we had a CTO like you. We had chaos everywhere and there were no mechanisms to grow in a scalable manner.

I loved your examples around creating autonomous business units, focussed on a few use cases and set expectations real and not just thinking of it as a resourcing problem.

I dont quite agree with the fix the code base before you hire engineers hypothesis though. I can see it as a chicken and egg problem. In my role, we essentially treated the spagetti codebase problem as a multi-phased approach to focus on incremental refactoring and moving to micro services for critical components and not think of doing all at once.