I'm saying the CTO title is bad for two reasons:

* It's a deceptively bad title to assume, because to a lot of people, it denotes someone who has stepped away both from coding and from actively managing MRDs and roadmaps. There are smart people with CTO titles, but, like it or not, there are a lot of dumb people with CTO titles too.

* The role itself is weak compared to the VP/E, who owns the dev schedule, and the VP/PM, who owns the roadmap and the customer contacts. Both those roles can win arguments with appeals to authority that the "CTO" can't counter.

It's not that marketable. It's a vulnerable and (often) superfluous role. It's a net lose. Avoid it!