A CTO and a the VP of Engineering are very different roles. Traditionally the CTO is the person in charge of research, stays up to date with tech, and explores how to apply tech on a high level to business problems. The VP of Eng. is the person who is in charge of making that vision a reality (so implementation).
And they both report to the CEO - if your VP of Eng. is reporting to the CTO that's a really bad thing.
> I have a rule of thumb — the smaller the company, the less CTO has to deal with people, and the bigger the company, the less CTO has to do with technology. At some points on this spectrum — it’s either full coding or full strategy.
This is just totally wrong. It's completely backwards. In a small company, the CTO is dealing with people and technology direction, because they are probably also doing VP of Eng. roles, unfortunately. This will not be good but may need to happen until someone else can step in. In a large company, the CTO should only be focused on tech, and should not be managing many people at all. That's the VP of Eng. job.
Neither role is well enough defined to make these kinds of statements.
The CTO could be the top of the IT org, and have nothing to do with research. There could be a Chief Scientist.
These roles are defined by the executive team as they are working. They are the only ones that can define them beyond a bunch of gross generalizations.
It does highly depend, but what I posed is the "standard" definition. I don't mean to imply this is any law that must be adhered to, just general guidance. Like the CEO, COO, CFO, and president roles have "formal definitions" but also often include overlapping responsibilities. Sometimes the CEO is also the CTO.
This is exactly right. The article opinion is pretty much flawed has the CTO should thrive to focus all its efforts on achieving a competitive edge for the product. By means of tech advantages, good partnerships or any other technical related matter. Similar to how the CEO should do the same from a less technical perspective.
The VP of Eng is very important to take as many management efforts from the CTO as possible. Similar to how the CFO takes from the CEO.
And they both report to the CEO - if your VP of Eng. is reporting to the CTO that's a really bad thing.
> I have a rule of thumb — the smaller the company, the less CTO has to deal with people, and the bigger the company, the less CTO has to do with technology. At some points on this spectrum — it’s either full coding or full strategy.
This is just totally wrong. It's completely backwards. In a small company, the CTO is dealing with people and technology direction, because they are probably also doing VP of Eng. roles, unfortunately. This will not be good but may need to happen until someone else can step in. In a large company, the CTO should only be focused on tech, and should not be managing many people at all. That's the VP of Eng. job.