CTO for smaller companies in Frankfurt Rhine-Main

What a CTO decides in an established company

A CTO answers for the technology a company sells or runs for its customers. In a smaller company that can be a customer portal, an online shop, a data service or software that grew next to the core business. The CTO decides how it is built and who builds it.

A firm with a Head of IT already has someone who keeps the workplaces and the business software running. A CTO adds the product side. The two positions meet at the cloud and the budget, so the table below draws the line.

CTO or Head of IT: who decides what

The CTO decides about the product, and the Head of IT decides about the company’s own IT. The right column names the work where I dealt with the CTO’s question myself.

Area	The CTO decides	The Head of IT decides	Where I dealt with it
Software	How the product or the customer portal is built, and by whom	Which business software staff use, such as ERP, CRM and email	Concept and rollout of a real-time market data product at a Frankfurt fintech
Data	What counts as one record, and who may change it	Backups and access rights to business data	The databases of a global real estate database, first as developer, later as CTO
Cloud and servers	Where the product runs, and what happens when a data center fails	Office network, workplaces and on-site servers	A move from Azure to another cloud, with a failover site (case)
Team	Which developers the product needs, and how code reaches production	IT support staff and IT apprentices	A node operations team I built up; a training authorization from IHK Frankfurt
Budget	Development, cloud and licenses for the product	Hardware, licenses and providers for the company’s own IT	The budgets as CIO of a Frankfurt fintech
Contracts	Terms and license agreements that customers sign	Contracts with IT providers	Terms, price definitions and license agreements of a market data product
AI	Which coding agents write code, and under which rules	Which AI tools staff may use, and with which data	Claude and Codex on a client’s platform, without push rights to the production branch (rules)
Customers	How the product’s technology is explained to customers and partners	How the company’s own staff get support	Talks with decision-makers at banks and stock exchanges

A smaller company can give both columns to one person. Then the title matters less than the column that comes first, and that is the first question of our call.

CTO, technical managing director or technical lead

German companies advertise the position under several titles. They differ in the authority that comes with them.

• A technischer Geschäftsführer (technical managing director) is a managing director of the GmbH. The appointment is entered in the commercial register, and the managing director represents the company.
• A technischer Leiter (technical lead or technical director) heads the technical department and reports to the management. In a manufacturing firm the title can also mean the head of production engineering.
• CTO is the English title. Firms use it for either form.

I have worked with both kinds of authority. I was Managing Director of a company. As CIO of a Frankfurt fintech I held procuration, which let me represent the company in the legal transactions of its business.

The teams I have led

I have more than ten years of leadership experience, with teams of up to 50 employees.

• As CIO of a Frankfurt fintech I had disciplinary responsibility for business-critical teams. I coordinated people from development, infrastructure, product and sales.
• Before that, as Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations in the same company, I built up the node operations team and ran the servers with it.
• In software projects I have managed teams of up to 20 people.
• As Managing Director and CTO of a company that built a global real estate database, I hired the people and led the teams.

I lead as a sparring partner. I learn who does what best with whom. As CIO I explained technical matters to the management in simple words. Your management gets its technical decisions from me in the same form.

Today Claude and Codex speed up how I build and change data platforms. On a client’s platform the agents have the rights of a new colleague: they read the database, they cannot push to the production branch, and a person confirms each production change.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke, and I live in Frankfurt. My path runs from code to CIO. I started with websites and databases, and with service work on server systems for banks. Later I led teams and budgets. At Claude Hacker House I teach practical work with Claude. I hold a training authorization from IHK Frankfurt for two IT apprenticeships.