Role Wars: Or, Can CTOs and VPEs Play Nice?
One interesting dynamic in and out of the Board room, for the company CEO and Executive Leadership Team (ELT), concerns that between the Chief Technology Officer and VP of Engineering (VPE) roles. This dynamic is sometimes as elegant as two tango dancers or as random and chaotic as a mosh pit.
But from the outside looking in, it’s the tension, friction, and squabbles around these roles—not to mention the outright-if-metaphorical UFC-style fighting over them—that garners the most attention.
In early-stage startup software companies, the CTO is drawn either from the founding team or comes to the company first as a consultant or advisor. The CTO at this stage plays many roles. They can be the company’s main visionary, or chief technologist, product strategist, or architect. In many ways they are in charge of designing and developing “moonshots.” They may also serve as the engineering or product manager. Often they partner with the CEO and advise on technology during internal planning and external financing, sales, and partnership meetings. Sometimes the CTO takes on the role of “hacker,” offering magical fixes to the code base. Perhaps most importantly, the CTO is often a leader in hiring the initial team of engineers.
In later “pre-Series A” seed rounds, where the writing is on the wall in many respects, the company needs to spec and fill other key positions:
A VPE to manage the expanding engineering team and deliver products on time
Software or Network Architect(s) to implement new products or refactor old ones
Product manager(s) to contribute to product planning, pricing, marketing, to perform competitive analysis and agile engineering (e.g., many product managers function as the scrum master or product leader)
Data scientist(s)
Project and or department manager(s)
Typically, the CTO has performed all these functions since company inception. One overlooked role of the CTO is that of a kind of doula providing guidance and support for the company’s evolving engineering organization and culture.
This doula role isn’t discussed often because it’s an assumed or expected duty of the CTO. This is unfortunate, since this role is one of the most consequential positions a CTO can play and begs for attention. Often, though, this aspect of the CTO role is lost in the bigger picture, where sales and revenue generation are larger problems initially, and then attention shifts toward a sales-oriented culture.
Once the startup scales and employs 15 to 20 engineers, a VPE becomes essential to not only keep the trains running on time, but also to ensure they’re on the right tracks. In short, the VPE is a facilitator of moonshots and is operationally focused.
Often, a startup’s angel investors, VC, and others, refer to the VPE as the “inside” guy and the CTO as the “outside” guy. This is superficial thinking, and the misperception about the two roles can lead to friction.
For example, in some companies the research and development (R&D) function of the company is overseen by both the CTO and engineers on the CTO’s team. Elsewhere, the CTO maintains the technology roadmap and leads initial product development before eventually turning these over to an engineering team.
Sometimes the VPE reports to the CTO until the CTO role pivots to focus on new technology and opening up markets. At that point, the VPE will begin reporting to the CEO.
Some CTOs create the “Office of the CTO" to ensure their moonshot projects end up as successful proof of concepts (POCs). These concepts, in turn, become products that are handed-off to the product manager and VPE. In many ways, the VPE is a facilitator who turns great ideas and POCs into scalable, revenue-bearing services and products.
Either arrangement can lead to turf wars and there is no universal solution. Sometimes the CTO and VPE alternately fill or split the roles of chief security officer (CSO), chief information security officer (CISO), or chief information officer (CIO). Misunderstandings, poor communication, or blurred division of responsibilities can result in tensions, disagreements, and fights.
(Sidebar: After blame is dully conferred on the parties involved, it can be incredibly instructive to examine the CEO’s role in these dustups. It almost always turns out they most want to remain hands-off in conflicts between adults with great comp packages who should know how to work out their own bullshit.)
In Series A and beyond, the CTO makes more speeches, meets more partners, and gets involved with due diligence activities by larger potential acquirers. The CTO is often responsible for opening international markets and building outsourced development teams—in conjunction with the VPE—outside the US.
CTOs often express a desire, post-Series A, to spend more time on new products and integrations. While the VPE’s operational influence increases over time, the CTO’s does as well, mainly through filing the patents and other IP for the company, or fighting IP infringements and helping conduct the due diligence involved in technology and strategic partnerships.
Successful CTOs can partition their brains, breaking from day-to-day operational management to devise brilliant new enhancements to current technology and innovative solutions for current and expanded markets.
While some CEOs, VCs, and others may claim titles are meaningless, that it’s the job you do that matters rather than the title you hold, the division of roles between the CTO and VPE is of real importance. The CEO is critical to continuing to evolve the CTO’s and VPE’s thinking about who they and what they do, drilling all the way down to the words chosen in their job descriptions.
In either role, the core duty is to be a leader, whether that means leading on what product is built, how it works, how it fits into the market, who it competes against and who uses it.
Another significant tension between the two roles are their relationships to the CEO.
On most org charts the CTO is a peer of the CEO responsible for creating and adjusting the technology roadmap and product vision. The VPE works as a complementary mechanism ensuring that the roadmap and vision are realized through spot-on execution. The VPE usually has a large team of engineering managers, engineers, and others reporting to them, and can have a wider span of control over human resources in a startup.
This can be problematic since, in some eyes, this arrangement diminishes the power and overall role of the CTO. Additionally, friction or conflict can arise when the CTO or VPE each help craft internal communications with the engineering team or external technical messaging and positioning.
In today’s world there are many companies who consider the “C” in CTO as meaning “main” instead of “Chief”. Many VPEs also need to understand a fundamental shift in the power structure, decision making, influence, and sway their job entails. The modern workplace requires more equity in all these realms, distributed throughout the engineering team rather than invested in any single person.
These new realities can be challenging.
CTOs and VPEs needed strong egos to get their jobs in the first place, but it’s those same egos (outsized, in some cases) that will get them into trouble with the Board and CEO, members of the ELT, investors, etc.
Most importantly, CTOs and VPEs need to understand the power of a positive working relationship between the two roles.
In the best of all possible worlds, the VPE and CTO work seamlessly and harmoniously, like Lennon and McCartney when they were writing some of the most important rock songs in history. Such a close relationship can achieve epic results in relatively short periods of time.
For all their greatness, The Beatles, perhaps the seminal band in all of rock history, produced some of the best music ever in just seven years (August 1962 to September 1969), largely due to their close working relationship. Likewise, when a CTO and VPE work hand-in-hand, the results can be staggering.
In general, there are four key areas governing the roles and responsibilities of the CTO and VPE:
Personnel management. For small teams (up to 10 FTE), the VPE directly supervises the technical staff. For larger teams (> 10 FTE), the VPE often manages contributing engineering managers, who serve as the direct supervisor of the technical staff. For teams at scale (> 100 FTE), the VPE’s direct reports will typically be senior level engineering directors, who in turn manage engineering managers.
Program management and engineering execution. There is typically an overall program plan covering the working relationship between disciplines (e.g. mechanical, electrical, controls, software), which in turn is a part of a company-wide program plan doing the same between departments (e.g. engineering, marketing, business development).
Technical leadership. The VP Engineering and CTO co-develop the technical strategy, while the VPE develops and maintains a technical roadmap for continuous innovation. The VPE may personally serve as a systems architect, or may assign another engineer to assume that role.
Strategy development. The VPE serves as part of the senior staff, working with their peers in other departments (e.g. fellow vice presidents in Marketing, Business Development, Manufacturing and Ops) as well as the CEO, CTO, and COO (if present) to develop company and product strategy.
The VPE traditionally wrangles the annual bottom-up budget for the engineering department, which is often the biggest cost center for a technology-based startup. Included in this budget are things like headcount, consulting spend, prototyping costs, equipment cost, travel and entertainment, professional development, patent applications, etc.
Like everything else in the current business climate, traditional leadership roles—which persist even in agile and fast-moving startups producing bleeding-edge tech—are shifting and changing almost at lightning speed. Companies that understand and insist on evolved thinking about what CTOs and VPEs do and how they do it, especially those that encourage these two all-important members of the ELT to work and play well together, will give themselves the best chance of success. These role shifts can be obstacles but, when approached correctly, can also be the thing that pushes a startup into unicorn territory.