

Want to know the difference between a CTO and a VP Engineering? - jpbutler
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/19/want-to-know-the-difference-between-a-cto-and-a-vp-engineering/

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koblas
It's more of a personality trait that a "role". A typical CTO in a small
organization is less of a people person and more of a technologist, the VPE is
more of a business process person (it needs to ship on tuesday, don't forget
the customer). As organizations upside into big entities that role separation
still exists, where the VPE is very much management (performance reviews,
schedules, budgets) and the CTO is now more front facing but still more
focused on the technologies/industry than the process.

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msuster
I agree that it is a personality trait, for sure. But those traits mean that
over time the "roles" become separate. I'm defining role as the person's job
function.

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elblanco
It seems to me that a good CTO can cross disciplines and understand technology
really well, but also understand the user of the product really well
regardless of the domain.

For example, if I make medical software, I should understand all of the
technology I can use to build the software, but I should really have a solid
understanding of how doctors operate and how my software can do something for
them at a practical level. The CTO also acts as an interface between wildly
different parts of an organization. Again on this example, I may have a doctor
on staff who tests our software and helps set requirements, but is not part of
engineering. The CTO should be able to capture those needs and build them into
the final product vision the VPE will then set about building.

A VPE on the other hand should understand technology really well, but also
understand all of the management considerations necessary to actually "build"
the thing. They may not know about being a doctor, but they can build a smart
work schedule that will make sure I get my product out the door on time and
within budget.

The third role he had there, PM, should know how to administer the plan the
VPE setup and keep all the ducks in a row. In a large organization, several
PMs will report status of various projects to the VPE and make sure that the
plan set forth by the VPE is operating.

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sonofjanoh
In my experience in a startup people have no labels/titles associated to them.
They are the directors and they have to take out the trash too. Tthe author
claims he has much experience in the "startup organization domain" but he
misses the point of hard, smart work on turning an idea into business
regardless of the labels each member has.

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msuster
You couldn't be further off base. I've built two companies from scratch and I
did all of the "cleaning the trash" work as did all my team members.

Nevertheless, it takes different skill types to build a technology
organization. Some will be super technical while some will be more process
driven. Some will be inspired to work on all of the latest technologies but
hate doing garden-variety feature coding or bug fixing while some people are
great utility players.

My post was silent on the issue of whether people with "titles" should do
grunt work. And to imply that I said otherwise is a misrepresentation of the
post.

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hga
I'll add that titles are useful in terms of making sure every essential
function is covered. No reason early on that one person can't have more than
one title, and as noted everyone should also have the title of "janitor", I've
always put is as "No one should be too proud to sweep the floor".

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msuster
I'm with ya.

