In an organization where the CTO is the executive manager of all of engineering, responsible for strategic leadership and oversight, what does the VP of Engineering do? What does a great VP of Engineering look like?
The VP of Engineering role varies just as much as the CTO role does, based on the needs of the organization. However, the VP role has one obvious difference from the CTO role. The VP is usually at the top of the management career ladder for engineers. This generally means that the VP is expected to be an experienced manager of people, projects, teams, and departments.
As companies grow, it’s common for the VP-level role to change from an organizationally focused job to a business strategy position. These people often act as mini-CTOs for divisions, balancing strategy and management. You may end up with multiple people in “VP of Engineering” roles who are responsible for portions of the engineering team. Their roles become more strategy-focused over time, while the organizational management duties fall more to their deputies at the director or senior director level. Let’s put the complexities of large companies aside and focus on the VP of Engineering that you’ll most likely encounter in a company that has a single person in this role.
As the person in charge of the day-to-day operations of the team, a good VP of Engineering has a solid handle on processes and details. She’s capable of tracking several in-flight initiatives at once and making sure they’re all going well. Often a great VP of Engineering is described as having a good “ground game.” This person is capable of dropping into the details and making things happen at a low level. While some CTOs will do this, if there’s both a CTO and a VP of Engineering, the VP is usually the one pushing the execution of ideas, while the CTO focuses on larger strategy and the position of technology within the company.
The VP of Engineering also handles a significant amount of management responsibility. She aligns the development roadmap to the hiring plan, planning out how teams need to evolve in order to make sense given the expected growth in the team. She may work closely with recruiting and run the hiring process, ensuring that résumé screening and interviewing are going smoothly. She should be a coach to the engineering management team, identifying and improving existing talent and working with HR to provide training and development resources for those leaders.
The VP of Engineering job is both a big one and a detail-oriented one. This is one of the reasons it’s such a hard job to hire for, even though most companies will need to hire this role in from outside. This person has to be good at quickly understanding what’s going on in an organization. She must be able to gain people’s trust and show wisdom in management and leadership. Unfortunately, most engineers are reluctant to trust people without technical credibility, but many managers at this level of seniority won’t be interested in going through a hard technical interview process only to take on a role that’s mostly focused on organizational management.
The VP of Engineering also needs to have some stake in organizational strategy, and often she owns this strategy entirely. She’ll be heavily involved in helping teams set goals to achieve business deliverables, and that means she’ll need to be closely aligned with the product team. She must ensure that the roadmap is realistic and that the business goals are translated into achievable goals for the technology organization. She should have a strong business and product instinct and a track record of getting teams to deliver big projects, including the ability to negotiate deliverables.
The people I know who excel in this role are capable engineers who care deeply about their teams and prefer to stay out of the spotlight in favor of creating high-performing organizations. They’re interested in the complexities of getting people to work together effectively. They want their teams to be happy, but they know that it’s important to tie that happiness to a sense of accomplishment. They represent the health of the team to the other senior leaders, and cultivate a healthy, collaborative culture. They are very comfortable identifying gaps in processes and managing highly complex, detailed work without getting overwhelmed.