Ask your teammates. Communicate.
The role of the CTO grows at the stage were you are immensly but the hardest switch you have to make is to manage people and not projects.
Because, you know you hired people for the projects.
Its OK to not know something, CTO's and principal engineers are not gods of their trade but people who use the synergies presented to them. That is not an archive of man pages that you have produced for your minions, but the combined effort of everyone (technical) involved.
Realizing that you may lack a certain set of information is a perfect point to reach out to someone in your team, who does. You will see that the exact opposite of what you are expecting will happen: people will you value more because you can be reasoned with. See it this way: even if you could theoretically barely program, I wold wager that you have more tech skills than some CTOs the past has brought up. Really successfull ones too.
Even if noone other in your team has the answers to your problem, the solution is still communication. Either hire talent or use freelancers and consultants. That is what we do. But the result its still the same, it's your team that is facing the problem, not the problem facing the team.
On the risk of sounding a bit funny, but maybe you should consider taking a management course?
Its OK to not know something, CTO's and principal engineers are not gods of their trade but people who use the synergies presented to them. That is not an archive of man pages that you have produced for your minions, but the combined effort of everyone (technical) involved.
Realizing that you may lack a certain set of information is a perfect point to reach out to someone in your team, who does. You will see that the exact opposite of what you are expecting will happen: people will you value more because you can be reasoned with. See it this way: even if you could theoretically barely program, I wold wager that you have more tech skills than some CTOs the past has brought up. Really successfull ones too.
Even if noone other in your team has the answers to your problem, the solution is still communication. Either hire talent or use freelancers and consultants. That is what we do. But the result its still the same, it's your team that is facing the problem, not the problem facing the team.
On the risk of sounding a bit funny, but maybe you should consider taking a management course?