You know that feeling in your gut?

The one that wakes you up at 3am wondering if you're building your tech organization all wrong?

I stood in front of 200 founders at SaaS Academy in San Diego, and when I asked who had concerns about their dev team's quality, velocity, team dynamics, or leadership - nearly everyone sat down.

Translation: Almost every founder in that room knew something was off. They just didn't know what to fix first.

Here's the thing nobody tells you: Your tech problems aren't actually tech problems.

They're focus problems.

The Question That Haunts Every Founder

"I'm racing to build product, but what am I not working on that's going to bite me six months from now?"

This question keeps founders grinding. It keeps CTOs up at night. And it's why I built what I'm about to show you.

But first, draw your favorite Tetris piece. (Seriously, if you have paper nearby, do it. This'll make sense in a second.)

The Tech Tetris Framework

Imagine a grid. Four rows, four columns.

The rows are your pain points:

• Quality (software that works)
• Velocity (shipping fast enough)
• Team (humans who don't hate each other)
• Leadership (someone steering this ship)

The columns are your revenue stages:

• 25K MRR
• 50K MRR
• 100K MRR
• 200K MRR

At each intersection, there are exactly four things you should focus on. Not forty. Four.

At 25K MRR:

• Tech stack (near-future proofing)
• Dependencies (avoiding disasters)
• Prototyping (validating fast)
• Code quality (because technical debt at 25K kills you at 500K)

You need at least 2 developers. If you have more than 2 at 25K MRR, congratulations on paying them nothing. (I'm kidding. Mostly.)

At 50K MRR:

• Testing (test coverage)
• Delivery (automated CICD, weekly or daily deploys)
• Performance (measuring it, not guessing)
• Catalyst (a dev team that solves problems, not just codes)

You need at least 4 developers here.

At 100K MRR:

• Trunk-based development (to my nerd friends: this is NOT git flow)
• DORA metrics (read "Accelerate" - seriously, do it)
• Product management (and no, CEO, you can't be the PM)
• Collaboration (breaking down those precious silos)

You need at least 6 developers.

At 200K MRR:

• Telemetry tools (New Relic, whatever gives you visibility)
• Data-driven decisions (not "we absolutely need this because reasons")
• Playbooks (show your team how to win)
• Customer-centric (empathy for the problem you're solving)

The Part That Changes Everything

See those focus areas? Some are technical (green in my original grid). Some are leadership (blue).

The blue items tell you when you need an actual CTO, not just senior developers.

At 50K MRR, if you don't have someone owning the "catalytic mindset" - someone who helps the team solve problems rather than just execute tickets - you're already behind.

At 100K MRR, if nobody's managing product and driving collaboration, you're burning money on misaligned sprints.

At 200K MRR, if you're not making data-driven decisions, writing playbooks, or building customer empathy into your culture - you're just a bigger version of a chaotic startup.

How To Actually Use This

Having quality issues? Look at your Quality column. Regardless of your revenue stage, those are your answers: tech stack, test coverage, trunk-based development, telemetry.

Velocity problems? Dependencies, automated delivery, DORA metrics, data-driven decisions.

Team issues? Prototyping culture, performance orientation, product management, playbooks.

Leadership vacuum? Code quality ownership, catalytic mindset, collaboration systems, customer focus.

Pick one column. Fix those four things. Move on.

What Nobody Wants To Admit

When I asked that room "who has zero MRR?" - crickets. Nobody wanted to admit it.

When I asked "who's seated?" after filtering for everyone with concerns - almost nobody was standing.

We're all grinding. We're all worried we're building the wrong thing. And we're all pretending we've got it figured out.

You don't need to have it figured out. You need a framework.

This grid? It's not genius. It's pattern recognition from watching hundreds of CTOs make the same mistakes at the same revenue stages.

Your tech organization isn't broken. It's just solving yesterday's problems while tomorrow's problems compound in the background.

Figure out which column you're in. Fix those four things. Then scale.

The Tetris piece of my talk? That was just to get you engaged. The real game is knowing which pieces to place first.

Want the actual grid? I'm uploading it to the 7CTOs community. Because frameworks that sit in slide decks don't change anything. Frameworks you actually use do.

If you're a CTO stuck between technical excellence and the leadership your company actually needs, let's talk. This grid is just the beginning.

etienne@7ctos.com