The next CTO doesn't need to be the best engineer in the room.

There is a version of the CTO role that made sense when technology was the hard part: the strongest engineer, promoted, still the final technical authority.

In most companies that role has quietly changed. The hard part is now allocation — where the investment goes, what gets partnered, which vendor relationships create dependency, how AI changes the unit economics of the product.

That is a commercial job performed by someone who is technically literate enough not to be sold to.

Strong engineers should own engineering. The executive job is to make sure they are building the right thing.