Decide Now What Should Outlast Your Tenure

This is the full playbook from “Leave a Team That Decides with the Customer in Mind.” The book prints a shorter version at the end of that chapter, and this page keeps every step and every example.

The Legacy and Customer-Impact Blueprint connects long-term aspirations to actions you can take now. Write your answers down. A vague answer here produces a vague legacy later.

1. Name the habit, not the achievement. Write down one habit of mind you want the organization to keep five years after you leave. Not a product, not a metric, not a person you developed. Not “we care about customers” but “whenever a design review stalls, someone asks how the customer experiences the disagreement differently.” If you can’t state it as a repeatable behavior, you’ve found a sentiment, not a habit.
2. Find where the habit lives today. Does it exist only in your head, enforced by your presence in reviews and one-on-ones? Or is it already encoded somewhere that would keep enforcing it if you left tomorrow: a written standard, an interview rubric, a dashboard, an incident process? Most CTOs discover here that the habit they most want to leave behind depends entirely on their own attendance.
3. Choose three of the five levers (hiring, architecture review, prioritization, metrics, on-call and incident response) and encode the habit into them first. Don’t choose all five. That’s the mistake from the top-three-priorities exercise in “The CTO Is a Coach First,” and it gives the same result: a list instead of a plan. For each lever, write the mechanism that keeps the habit alive without you: a rubric question, a dashboard field, a required section in a proposal template.
4. Write the customer-impact statement your successor will inherit. In one paragraph, state what “customer-first” means for this organization at this stage. Your version, not the generic one. State what it does not mean: the technically impressive work you choose not to prioritize because it fails the test. Hand it to the person who replaces you the way a Standard of Performance gets handed down rather than reinvented.
5. Set a five-year trigger. Choose a specific, checkable way to learn years from now whether the habit survived: a former report you can ask, as I asked that engineer at the conference; a metric that must still be tracked; a document that must still be in active use and not archived. If you can’t check the result, you’ve written an intention, and intentions don’t survive leadership transitions.

This exercise is uncomfortable on purpose. It shows how much of the work you’re proudest of depends on your continued attendance. Decide now, while you still have the authority to change it, whether that’s the legacy you want.

All of the playbooks are listed on the playbooks page.