Head of Engineering vs VP vs CTO
In my previous issue I went over entry-level leadership roles. Today I’ll try to disambiguate the three most common senior ones.
The meaning of executive leadership roles varies a lot from company to company, but each one tends to follow a limited set of patterns.
Chief Technology Officer
Most tech companies start out with a technical co-founder, whose title defaults to CTO. This person is usually focused on shipping code. They may or may not have management experience.
Some companies are founded by non technical people, who bring in developers as employees when it’s time to develop product. Someone needs to be the bridge between developers and founders, so a more senior person is typically hired for that role. That person’s title varies a lot: CTO is common, but so is Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering, and even CPTO (Chief Product and Technology Officer). Normally, this person is expected to be experienced enough to be able to anticipate the next few steps in the company’s growth and set things up accordingly: hiring, organizational structure, practices and standards, culture.
When the tech org reaches a dozen or so people, the CTO is expected to work more closely with the founders than with the developers.
A founder once told me that being CTO of early stage, scale-up, venture and post-exit stages are very different jobs. My friend and former boss Nuno Simaria knows this better than anyone, having been CTO at HelloFresh for over 8 years, taking it from half a dozen developers well into the thousands. By the way, you can hear his thoughts in this episode of Source Talks.
Back to the 12 developer stage. If growth is slow, it’s enough to have Engineering Managers and/or Team Leads who can focus on the developers and their daily job of delivering code, interfacing with the CTO for high level guidance.
If fast growth is anticipated, companies often split the CTO role in two right away:
Founder-facing, strategic thinking, high level direction and budget raising
Engineer-facing, concrete thinking, specific direction and budget allocating
After the split, CTOs are technical enablers. Their job is to know how technology can enable and grow the business, and work hand in hand with other C-levels towards that goal. This leaves very little time to run the engineering organization directly.
Someone is then brought in to be the engineering-focused executive.
Head of Engineering
Most companies I worked for either have the Head Of title or the Vice President title in their org charts, not both. They’re synonymous in the sense that both manage managers and report to a senior executive.
One distinction is that Head of Engineering is very flexible title.
Smaller startups, which haven’t yet figured out their long term org structure, often have a Head of Engineering as acting CTO or sidekick to one.
If there’s no CTO, the Head Of can grow into the role alongside the company. Savvy CEOs sometimes wait and see where the company is going, and keep the CTO role open until they’re big enough to hire a very high profile one.
It’s possible to have multiple Heads of Engineering, each one focused on a specific area of Engineering. However, when this happens, the organization is either large enough to support a structure of VPs, or else the title of Director is a more common choice.
Vice President of Engineering
The presence of the VP role typically hints at a larger, more complex organization. These organizations can do away with the ambiguity of the Head Of title and adopt more standard nomenclature.
VPs normally report to either a Senior VP or the CTO, and manage Directors or Senior Directors. In some companies, Heads Of report to VPs.
When there’s only a VP reporting to a CTO, they’re the engineer-focused executive I mentioned earlier. They’re usually much more technical.
If there are multiple VPs, each one normally focuses on a well defined area of technology. There might be a VP of Infrastructure Engineering, VP of Mobile Engineering, VP of Growth Engineering etc.
Chief Product and Technology Officer
Some companies conflate the chief Product and Technology roles into a single person. This can work. A former colleague of mine took one such role, progressed towards becoming CEO, and their company is doing really well! But it takes an exceptional individual to manage in their own mind what should normally be a healthy tension between Product and Technology. The default result of this role is leaning too far towards one side and leaving the other under-supported.
Conclusion
Naming things is hard. People’s titles are no exception. Individual companies can and do assign different meaning to the same roles, but there are clear patterns in the industry.
A CTO can be the original developer of a startup, and grow into the role as it explodes towards a billion dollar exit. Or they can be a seasoned professional brought in to add structure. Either way, beyond the smallest of companies a CTO is oriented much more towards the business than programming, and ensures the technology serves the business well.
Vice Presidents of Engineering are executive people managers but have much more of a focus on technology. They look mainly towards their reports whereas the CTO looks more to the founders and other C-levels. The VP title is often found at larger companies with more developed organizational structures.
Heads of Engineering can be anywhere in the org chart. It’s a flexible title, which can be anything from the de facto CTO, all the way in to little more than Engineering Manager. Because of its flexibility, the title is very popular at pre-IPO startups.
But of course each company is different. Those in the industry understand this fact. If you’re looking for an executive leadership role, my advice is to focus more on the nature of the organization you’re looking to lead more than the title itself.
Thanks for reading! If there’s a topic you’d like to see covered, let me know.
Enjoy the weekend ☀️