Mission

A leader with a vision for how to build a highly effective engineering organization. Great ones know what work to hand off and are continuously motivating those beneath them in the style required.

This is the same role as Engineering Director, with some extra responsibilities that stack on top of.

Responsibilities

• Remove Technical - relying on others to achieve technical goals, this is handled by CTO.

Key performance indicator

• What does success look like for the VP of Engineering role?
  • Leverage people with good enough depth into the function to manage it effectively
  • Example: The guys from Doctolib
  • As organizations get bigger, the VP of Engineering role tends to be rebranded CTO (100+ engineers).
  • Lagging indicators of success:
    1. If there is a technical problem, we can solve it: we know how to staff it to get it solved.
    2. Where is the bottleneck in the org when we don’t succeed? It’s not in engineering.
    3. x2 our product scope without x2 the engineering team.
    4. Covering a non-component product that involves backend.
    5. Strong support from Engineering with the other functions.

Benchmarks

• VP of Engineering [https://review.firstround.com/hiring-a-vp-of-engineering-use-this-framework-from-shopify's-vpe-to-get-it-righ](https://review.firstround.com/hiring-a-vp-of-engineering-use-this-framework-from-shopify's-vpe-to-get-it-right#people-assessing-a-candidates-team-building-chops#1-attracts-candidates-and-creates-pipeline#1-attracts-candidates-and-creates-pipeline#2-makes-the-team-more-valuable-for-having-worked-there#3-gets-energy-from-helping-others-succeed#process-assessing-a-candidates-optimization-skills#1-experiments-with-the-development-process#2-reduces-admin-burden#3-focuses-on-continuously-delivering-value-to-the-customer#2-reduces-admin-burden#1-experiments-with-the-development-process#technology-assessing-a-candidates-ability-to-dive-deep#1-isnt-afraid-to-ask-tough-or-deep-questions)
• https://code.dblock.org/2015/05/07/what-is-the-difference-between-cto-and-vp-or-head-of-engineering.html
  • What is the difference between a CTO and a (VP or Head) of Engineering?
    • A CTO carries a unique responsibility of placing technology within non-engineering organizations and representing the technology point-of-view with investors or the board.
    • VP or Head of Engineering helps individual contributors and leads focus on the tasks at hand and drums up the beat of continuous delivery.
• https://www.platohq.com/articles/hiring-for-a-director-of-engineering-1293717050