
How the role evolved from running servers to sitting in strategy meetings
Where it differs from the CTO, CDO and CPO
Technology leadership as a driver of efficiency and innovation
The competences the job actually requires
Building an IT strategy around business goals rather than technology preferences
Digital transformation: what drives it and what the stages are
Assessing your current IT and digital maturity
Writing a roadmap that survives three years
Cloud, on-premise and hybrid: what each decision costs you later
Continuity and fault tolerance
Modern threats and the protection that matches them
Regulation and standards: GDPR, ISO, SOC 2
Structuring the IT function and its roles
Leadership and developing the people inside it
Working with top management and the business units
Managing vendors and outsourcing without losing control
What the data-driven company expects from the IT function
Data lakes, BI and real-time analytics
Metrics and KPIs for IT itself
Working with the data and AI leadership
AI, IoT, blockchain, quantum and edge, assessed soberly
Selecting technology that creates value rather than headlines
Pilot projects and the move to rollout
Embedding innovation into the business model
ITIL, COBIT and ISO as a management framework
Managing the technology project portfolio
Agile, waterfall and hybrid, and when each applies
Working with the PMO
Moving IT from a cost centre to a value creator
Technology leadership at board level
Building a digital ecosystem
Where the profession is heading and what it demands next
The CTO as strategist rather than senior engineer
How the role differs from CIO, CPO and VP of Engineering
Balancing business demands against technical reality
Key competences of the role
Building a technology strategy around business goals
The stack and the criteria for choosing it
System architecture: monolith, SOA, microservices
Current directions: cloud, AI, data-driven, edge, security-by-design
Structuring engineering teams and their roles
Agile, Lean and DevOps as the working basis
Hiring and keeping strong developers
Engineering culture and mentorship
Working with the CEO, the product function and the business
Prioritising technology initiatives against each other
Balancing innovation with keeping legacy alive
Metrics: velocity, ROI, time-to-market, and security as part of the product
Supporting company growth with technology
Architecture built for scale: cloud-native, microservices, API-first
Cost management and infrastructure optimisation
Supporting M&A and entry into new markets
The technology vectors worth watching
Creating competitive advantage through innovation
Partnership ecosystems and open innovation
Technology leadership as the driver of digital transformation
The point at which operations stops being everyone's spare time
How it differs from project management and the COO role
Key areas of operational responsibility
Typical mistakes when introducing the function
What a process is and what it is not
End-to-end thinking and value for the business
Mapping the key processes
Where formalisation helps and where it suffocates
Why metrics fail in most companies
Input, output and outcome indicators
Metric owners and real accountability
Dashboards that management actually opens
Where the company quietly loses time, money and focus
Bottlenecks and system constraints
Queues, downtime and context switching
Standardisation, quick wins, and when automation is genuinely needed
Why functions fail to connect with each other
Cross-functional processes and reducing friction
Operational meetings and status updates
Weekly, monthly and quarterly rhythms
Why order keeps breaking down as you grow
Operations during scaling
Managing change through processes
Resistance and inertia, and when to stabilise rather than rebuild
The operational toolkit
Process and workflow systems
Metrics, dashboards and data sources
When a spreadsheet beats a corporate system, and typical automation mistakes
Who comes into operations and from where
Operations as a strategic management role
Proving its value and calculating the return
Career tracks and a personal roadmap
What FinOps is and why cloud budgets grow without it
Where FinOps overlaps with finance, DevOps and IT, and where it conflicts
Roles: engineering, finance, product, procurement
The maturity model — Crawl, Walk, Run — and FinOps KPIs
The typical cost structure across the major clouds
Compute, storage, network and managed services: where the leaks are
Why bills look incomprehensible and how to translate them
Shared costs, hidden spend, and the accounting architecture of tags and cost centres
Why the business needs chargeback and showback
Allocation models by product, team and user
Mandatory tags, excess tags, and fixing tagging mistakes
How not to turn FinOps into the finance police
Compute optimisation: rightsizing, autoscaling, idle resources
Storage classes and lifecycle policies
Reserved instances, savings plans and commitments — when they pay off
Dev and test environments as the main source of overspend
Which metrics FinOps actually needs
Cost versus usage versus value
Unit economics in the cloud: cost per user, feature, transaction
Dashboards for the CTO, the CFO and product, and the vanity metrics to avoid
Launching FinOps from scratch
The monthly, quarterly and annual FinOps rhythms
Talking to engineering, product and finance without conflict
Typical resistance, the roles, the salaries and a 90-day roadmap
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
The hardest part of running a technology function is that almost none of it is technical.
You get promoted for being good at the work, and then spend your week on budgets, vendors, priorities and explaining to a CFO why the cloud bill went up again.
What nobody hands you with the title
A framework for deciding which projects get funded. A way to read a cloud invoice and say where the money went. Language for talking about architecture with people who will never open a terminal. A method for judging whether an AI initiative is worth starting or is somebody's enthusiasm. And a governance model, so that decisions are made once instead of re-litigated every quarter.
Most IT managers assemble these from experience over about five years. This course is the compressed version.
How it is put together
Five functions, in the order they land on you. First IT management as a business function: strategy tied to business goals, maturity assessment, a 3-5 year roadmap, infrastructure and security choices, vendors, data, and governance through ITIL, COBIT and ISO. Then the technology side: architecture and stack decisions, engineering teams, Agile and DevOps, and what scaling actually requires of the architecture.
Execution, cost and AI
Then operations, because a strategy nobody can execute is a document. Processes, operational metrics with real owners, bottlenecks, cross-functional rhythms. Then FinOps, which is the part most technology leaders wish they had learned earlier: reading cloud bills, allocation and chargeback, tagging, rightsizing, commitments, unit economics per user and per feature.
And finally AI as a managed portfolio rather than a set of experiments — prioritising by impact, feasibility and risk, build against buy against partner, data readiness, governance, ethics, and the ROI calculation you will be asked for.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals — all technology companies, where I spent a great deal of time on the other side of these conversations with IT.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Where to start if you are short on time
Take the FinOps section first. Cost is the fastest way to earn the credibility you need for everything else, and it is the one area where results show up in a single quarter. Then go back to the beginning. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.