CTO-in-a-Box
Twenty-six battle-tested templates covering the full scope of the CTO role.
Strategy, team, operations, security, finance, product alignment, coding standards, AI coding tool governance, and the board-level communication that separates technology leaders from technology managers. Every framework already survived contact with reality at companies from 15-person startups to 350-person global engineering orgs.
The first enterprise CTO kit with AI coding tool governance built in.
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Individual License
$347
Twenty-six frameworks for under $15 per framework. Lifetime access. Free v2 update for buyers who submit feedback.
Enterprise License
$997
Unlimited users within one organization. Right pick for engineering directors rolling the kit out across multiple teams.
Format
Markdown files
Convert to Notion, Google Docs, Confluence, PDF, or whatever your team uses. No vendor lock-in.
The 26 Templates, Organized by Domain
Pull the right one off the shelf when the situation demands it. The value compounds over months, not days.
Strategy & Planning
- 01. Technical Strategy. Roadmap, architectural direction, investment priorities the rest of the business depends on.
- 09. Engineering OKRs. Translate business objectives into engineering outcomes that ship, with measurement built in.
- 17. Product-Engineering Alignment. End the CTO-CPO standoff with structured prioritization, plus a Power Apps intake form implementation guide.
- 18. Stakeholder & Board Reporting. Board decks, exec updates, and the language that earns technology a seat at the strategy table.
Team & Leadership
- 03. Engineering Team Scaling. When to hire, which roles next, org-structure models, and the scaling traps that kill momentum.
- 04. Engineering Interview Rubric. Scorecards and question banks by role level. Replaces gut-feel hiring with structured decisions.
- 15. Leadership Development & Succession. Build leaders before you need them. Retain your best people with a path forward.
Operations & Engineering Excellence
- 02. Architecture Decision Record (ADR). Document architectural choices in a format future-you will thank present-you for writing.
- 10. Sprint Retrospective. Facilitation guide plus template. Generates real improvements instead of recycled complaints.
- 11. On-Call Runbook. Documentation standard that makes escalation obvious and reduces burnout.
- 13. DevOps Pipeline Standardization. CI/CD pipeline design without over-engineering. What to build, what to skip.
- 21. Technical Debt Management. Quantify debt, prioritize paydown against feature work, and defend the investment to the business.
- 23. Engineering Metrics Dashboard. DORA metrics plus the quality and team-health measures that actually predict outcomes.
Security & Compliance
- 06. Security Audit Checklist. Authentication, network, data, application, vendor, and incident readiness. CIS benchmarks, pen-testing lifecycle, and a 4-stage Security Maturity Model.
- 07. Incident Response Playbook. The IR process from detection through resolution and lessons learned.
- 14. DevSecOps Framework. Security integrated into the development lifecycle, not bolted on at the end.
- 19. Post-Mortem & Blameless Review. Surface root causes without blame, produce durable fixes, and build team trust.
- 20. Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity. RTO/RPO definitions, recovery procedures, and the board conversations that unlock DR investment.
- 22. Data Privacy & Compliance. GDPR, CCPA, PCI, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 coverage.
Business, Financial & AI Governance
- 05. Vendor / Tool Evaluation Scorecard. A structured decision framework that prevents the "shiniest demo wins" trap.
- 08. Technical Due Diligence. M&A and fundraising tech assessment. Use it when acquiring, when being acquired, or when raising capital.
- 12. AI Implementation Assessment. AI readiness and opportunity evaluation for organizations navigating the shift from speculation to operational reality.
- 16. Fiscal Stewardship & FP&A Framework. The CTO as financial partner, not cost-center manager. Build business cases that tie technology investment to revenue, and earn FP&A fluency that gets a seat at the strategy table. Differentiator: no competing kit ships this.
- 24. AI Coding Tool Governance. Deploy Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and Continue across your team without losing control of code quality, security, or standards. Tool approval matrices, rules files (
CLAUDE.md,.cursorrules,AGENTS.md), prompt data protection, AI-aware code review, adoption metrics, onboarding, and incident response. Differentiator: the first enterprise CTO kit to include this governance layer. - 25. Coding Standards Framework. Write down the unwritten conventions your senior engineers already follow. Style, language usage, architecture boundaries, dependencies, testing, error handling, and security across seven domains. Includes starter standards documents for TypeScript, Python, Rust, Go, Java, C#, and SQL.
- 26. Prompt Patterns for Engineering Teams. Get consistent, on-standard output from AI coding tools across your workflow. Patterns by phase (design, code generation, review, testing, documentation, debugging). Tool-agnostic.
What Makes This Kit Different
The AI Quality Trinity
Most CTO template kits were written before AI coding tools landed inside engineering teams. This kit ships three templates designed for that reality, working together as a unit.
Template 24
Governance
Tool approval, prompt data protection, AI-aware code review, and the rules files that keep AI-generated code on-standard.
Template 25
Coding Standards
The standards your AI tools and your engineers both follow. Starter docs for seven languages, enforcement via tooling and rules files.
Template 26
Prompt Patterns
Patterns by engineering phase. Get consistent, standards-conformant output from Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and Continue.
Who This Kit Is For
New CTOs and VPs of Engineering
Stepping into the role for the first time and looking for the playbook nobody handed you. Pull a framework off the shelf at the right moment instead of reinventing it under pressure.
Technical Founders
Building the engineering function from zero. Use the templates as starting points, then adapt to your context in a single working session.
Fractional CTOs and Advisors
Twenty-six frameworks ready to deploy across multiple clients. Stop rebuilding the same artifacts at every engagement.
Engineering Directors Preparing for Executive Roles
Build the executive-level artifacts that separate director conversations from CTO conversations. Board reporting, fiscal stewardship, AI governance.
CEOs and COOs Who Want to Understand Good Technology Leadership
Understand what your CTO should be producing. Use the templates to evaluate the technology function and ask the questions that drive better outcomes.
About the Author
Craig Hunt has led technology organizations across 20+ years in Ad Tech, InsurTech, Auto Tech, MarTech, EdTech, eCommerce, ERP/CRM, and IoT sectors.
Scale: 350+ person global teams, $500M+ revenue oversight, SANS-certified in application security, penetration testing, and data loss prevention. Advises fractional CTO clients through Sagecrest Solutions, LLC.
These templates exist because Craig kept rebuilding the same frameworks at each company, each time a little better. Packaging them cuts the cycle so the next generation of technology leaders can skip that learning tax.
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