I was a CTO for a little more than two years. When I joined we had 3 people as direct reports which grew to around 12 when I left. Besides hiring people, all I felt like I was doing was product manager work with talking to clients about their requirements and putting those into stories, tasks etc. Additionally I would pull together discussions on the evolution of our stack and handle the finances around the cloud implementations of our technology (on Azure). What else does a CTO do? I deeply disliked it because I was working for 14 hours a day most of which was dead time but communication was frequent enough that I couldn’t do anything else.