Differences between VP Engineering and CTO

While the VP Engineering role is well established in US tech companies, it was still relatively new in France in 2020. We had similar titles but they didn't quite map to the same function - much like "Directeur Technique" isn't exactly the same as a CTO.

When we decided to hire a VP Engineering at Malt, I realized there wasn't much content about this from a founder's perspective - especially about how the role overlaps with a founding CTO.

So I wanted to share how we introduced this role in our engineering team, covering questions like:

At what team size does it make sense?
What profile should you look for?
How do the CTO and VP Eng roles coexist without stepping on each other's toes?

Disclaimer: this is written from a founding CTO's perspective, which matters. As a founder, you have the luxury of choosing how your role evolves, unlike someone joining with a predefined VP or CTO mandate.

From what size of team should we hire a VP Engineering?

Recently I wrote a post on the evolution of the role of CTO from startup to scaleup. In particular, I said that this role of CTO in the early stages includes being the first developer, the guarantor of the technological vision and the one who will create the product team for its scaling up.

Over time, I learned to step back from parts of the role to find the people who will replace me on some parts of the job.

The role straddles a role of individual contributor, leadership and management.

And then at some point in the growth of the company, as a CTO I had to make a choice. It is getting harder and harder to be a developer, recruiter, organizer, strategy manager, coach, etc.

And when I write this, it is for obvious reasons of time available in a day. Let me explain.

If we take the main axes of the role of CTO in a startup, we find:

the technological vision (definition of the architecture, scalability, feasibility)
human management (coaching, recruitment, loyalty, performance management)
execution and delivery management (organization and staffing of teams, communication process, agile methods, quality measures)
product vision (match between tech and business, product definition, strategy, discussion with other C-Level, discussions with customers)

For a founding CTO, we must add all the diversity of tasks related to the creation and growth of the company.

Even if we assume that the person is competent and motivated by all these aspects of the job, we're constrained by the hours in a day.

However, when the company grows, each of these roles takes more time (1) so you have to make choices, or do everything less well, which is a choice too :)

So, when does it become necessary?

We often talk about the threshold of 7/8 people which corresponds to the ideal size of a team, the famous two pizza team from Amazon .

At that point, we can already look for an Engineering manager to take over part of the responsibility for delivery (organization, process, quality, people management).

My point of view is that, in a startup, each recruitment counts from a financial point of view and it's still overkill in a team of 8 to start introducing "organizational" roles.

So my strategy was a little different, I deliberately only hired seniors who, in theory, do not require management.

In short, for a startup with a founding CTO, who has the skills of a VP (2) , I would move this level rather around 15/20 people.

In practice, how did we recruit our VP at Malt?

At the end of 2018 there were around 30 of us in the product team, we were past the point where we should have hired... There was no engineering manager (and therefore no VP either).

Except that the year 2018 had shown me the limits of the model. My capacity to develop had decreased by 50% compared to 2015 because the recruitment of the year had taken me a long time. At the same time, I was able to spend less and less time with the more and more members of the team.

What I knew was that I wanted to relieve myself of human management and delivery management, even though I liked these subjects.

It took me a while to define what I expected and how it would work. And I struggled to articulate what I needed, which made it hard to explain to others. Having trouble defining it, I probably had trouble explaining it, for example to Vincent, co-founder, who, like me a few months earlier, thought it was premature to add an organizational role in a small structure.

Except that it was already too late.

First quarter 2019 I put on paper a job description, a description allowing to separate the role of the CTO from that of the VP. This step was important since it allowed me to formalize for myself but also for the candidates I was going to meet.

According to our ATS (application tracking system), 40 people entered the process for this position. 6 went so far as to meet the team.

The process started in February / March 2020 and ended in September for a post in December.

For me, the exercise was very difficult. I know how to recruit Software Engineers very well, I have a well-honed process and at each stage I know how to detect the bad and the good signs.

But an engineering manager or a VP, I was not used to it. I had somewhat general criteria: the fact of having already lived a phase of scale for example. But this was about finding the person with whom the relationship had to be perfect.

I've met a lot of great people, but it's hard to know if I could have worked with them, if we were going to share the same vision. It's a bit like choosing a roommate. And then I was going to delegate parts on which I was rather happy with my results and I wanted the work to be in the same spirit.

As a result, it was complicated to know whether or not I was making a good decision on each person I could meet and I was undoubtedly very conservative on some cases ...

We ended up hiring Benoit Guillon, ex Director Engineering at Talend. But to be honest, we had worked together 10 years prior. And the confidence I had in this person was a key criterion for the final choice.

The typical profile of a VP Engineering

This paragraph title is a bit misleading, there is no such thing as a typical profile, or at least, we will not all have the same definition of this typical profile.

From my point of view, a VP engineering has gone through development. There are examples of successful VPs that weren't dev, but this is an exception.

He/she is a person who must be able to understand the subtleties of development issues and the constant trade-off between the short and the long term. Be careful, however, a VP has not necessarily been a great dev and this person is not expected to lead the technology vision.

In terms of career path within an engineering team, we can find people who have gone through Chief Architect, Engineering Manager, Principal Engineer, so with a notion of leadership in the role.

Being a good developer doesn't automatically make you a good manager. People must progress in stages, so in theory in most cases, we tried to target a person who had already experience on a similar or slightly smaller team size.

In our case, the criterion was that the future VP should have managed a team at the next stage of growth, so around 100 people. We were trying to learn from the person in question to gain speed of execution.

Is recruiting a VP inevitable?

I said above that from a certain level, the CTO must make a choice on what he wants to do (and can do). It is quite possible that the founding CTO chooses to focus on the VP function (people and delivery).

The recruitment of a VP and the fact of abandoning these activities is not inevitable.

On the contrary, it is quite possible to abandon the technological vision part and no longer get your hands dirty soon enough. In this case, the CTO will rather look for a Principal Engineer or a Chief Architect.

But I'm cheating a bit in my answer, if you followed, indeed the founding CTO has the choice not to recruit a VP, but in this case he/she will take this role (with or without change of title, it is not the important point).

Role of CTO vs role of VP engineering

Concretely, what is the role of the VP engineering?

VP and CTO are roles with a lot of variations depending on the company because the articulation of the two roles can lead to shifting more or less subjects to one or the other.

In some cases, the VP can take charge of all the tech strategy, delivery and people management and the role of CTO can completely disappear.

I want to emphasize, this role can have quite different responsibilities and hierarchical attachment according to the companies.

So in order not to rewrite what many others have already written well before me, I offer you a selection of sources at the end of the post that complete my remarks.

At Malt, the VP has the people management (perf reviews, team culture and engagement, organization, recruitment) and delivery under his responsibility. The tech strategy is still shared between CTO and VP. As a CPTO I am more outward looking and long-term strategy.

Changes since the arrival of the VP

This will serve as the conclusion for this post.

In 2021, the role of VP is entirely focused on the growth of the company with a huge focus on recruitment, a strong work on the onboarding, the growth of the engineers and the quality of the delivery whose speed must not suffer from the growth.

The arrival of a VP gave me perspective on my own role. This directly echoes the post "CTO from startup to scaleup" that I mentioned above.

I was able to refocus on a role more oriented towards tech strategy, product strategy and more focused on other teams. This transition is still underway and the company continues to evolve quite a bit at this time.

Notes:

This is also true of all roles and this is why a growing team needs more and more specialists in a function.
I underline in bold because if the CTO has no appetite for people management and recruitment, on the contrary, someone will have to be quickly found for that. But from my point of view it is a relatively rare and abnormal case that the founding CTO is put off by these aspects.

Other sources:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vpe-cto-brad-henrickson/ : we find the role variations for CTO and VPE

https://www.beautifulcode.co/blog/94-vp-of-engineering-vs-cto-who-does-what with a proposal for separation of roles by axis: vision, strategy, supervision, responsibility, planning etc ...

https://superorbital.io/journal/cto-vs-vpe/ a mini-post that insists that a CTO does not lead teams, while a good VP can lead hundreds of developers

https://jellyfish.co/blog/cto-vs-vp-engineering/ this article nevertheless mentions the possibility for a CTO to keep a small team of tech lead with him to work on RD

https://www.ivyexec.com/career-advice/2015/cto-versus-vp-engineering-whats-the-difference/ idem, the CTO is even seen at the same hierarchical rank with report to the CEO, like the VP

https : //review.firstround.com/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandments-for-scaling-startups Less directly linked but relates the importance of knowing how to change roles with the growth of a company