What Great Technical Leadership Looks Like in a PE-Backed Business

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The gap between adequate technical leadership and great technical leadership is difficult to see from the outside. Both get the day-to-day work done and both can point to systems that are running and products that are shipping. The difference shows up under pressure, when the business is growing faster than its foundations can support, when a transaction is approaching or when a board is asking questions that require technical and commercial thinking to work together rather than in parallel.

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That gap is also one of the most significant drivers of value creation and value destruction in PE-backed businesses. Getting it right compounds, getting it wrong costs more than most boards realise until they are looking at the evidence in a due diligence report.

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The Shift From Doing to Leading

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One of the most consistent patterns we observe in technical leaders who have outgrown their current approach is an attachment to being close to the work. The instinct to roll up sleeves, to be in the detail, to be the person who knows the codebase best, is not a bad one in a small team. It becomes a constraint when the organisation needs its technical leader to be somewhere else entirely.

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Lee Provoost, CTO of Flagstone, described this shift with unusual candour when reflecting on his own development as a leader.

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"I was very much of the belief that you can only be a good leader if you roll up your sleeves and lead from the front in the trenches with the team. That doesn't scale very well. Most of the time, the team don't want you in the trenches. They really want you to remove friction, deal with blockers and handle executive stakeholder management. I had to learn that the hard way." - Lee Provoost, CTO, Flagstone

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The value a CTO brings to a PE-backed business at scale is not in the code they write or the technical decisions they make unilaterally. It is in the environment they create, the team they build, the clarity they bring to decisions that would otherwise stall and the ability to translate between what the technology can do and what the business needs it to do.

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Execution Over Ideas

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Great technical leadership in a growth context is defined by execution. The ability to take a complex programme of work, maintain momentum through the inevitable setbacks and deliver without disrupting the business running underneath it is what separates the technical leaders who create lasting value from those who create interesting plans.

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Kirsty Rutter, who leads venture capital efforts at Lloyds Banking Group, has a direct view on this from the investment side.

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"Innovation and change and ideas are fab, but unless you actually get executing, it counts for not very much." - Kirsty Rutter, Head of Venture Capital, Lloyds Banking Group

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Execution at this level requires more than technical competence. It requires the ability to manage upwards, to communicate progress and risk in terms that a non-technical board can act on and to maintain the confidence of a leadership team that may not fully understand what is being built but needs to trust that it is being built well. Those are skills that have nothing to do with architecture and everything to do with leadership.

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The First Team Problem

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One of the more subtle but consequential differences between adequate and great technical leadership is where the CTO places their primary loyalty. The instinct is to see the engineering leadership team as the first team, the group of direct reports who share the technical context and whose success the CTO is most directly responsible for. That instinct is understandable and also limiting.

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"My assumption was that my first team was my senior tech leadership team. Over the past couple of years, I have come to the realisation that that is not true. My first team is my peers on the exec team. The CFO, the Chief Product Officer. Those are the people who will help you when things go wrong, when you need to unblock something. And you can have confidential conversations with them that you simply cannot have with your direct reports." - Lee Provoost, CTO, Flagstone

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For a PE-backed business, a CTO who is genuinely embedded in the executive team rather than operating as a functional head with a seat at the table is a fundamentally different asset. They are in the room when commercial decisions are made that have technical implications. They can surface risk before it becomes visible in delivery. And they can represent the technical position to investors in a way that builds confidence rather than raising questions.

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What to Look For

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When assessing technical leadership, whether you are evaluating an existing CTO, making a new appointmen or considering interim or fractional options, the signals that matter most are rarely technical. They are about how the person communicates, how they manage upwards, how they think about the business alongside the technology and whether they have the resilience to lead a complex programme through the periods where progress is slow and the pressure is high.

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At Gathered and Found, we work alongside leadership teams to assess technical capability, identify gaps and provide the interim or fractional support needed to close them. The businesses that get the most from that engagement are those who have been honest about what they actually need from technical leadership, rather than defaulting to the job description they have used before.

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At Gathered and Found, we help PE-backed businesses assess, strengthen, and where needed, provide technical leadership at every stage of growth. If you are evaluating your current technical leadership capability, get in touch.

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