One job, many roles: The different skills needed to be a successful CTO
The role the article describes is usually called a VP of Engineering.  The distinction between them is that VP Eng is an operational role - you&#x27;re responsible for managing a team of developers; instituting the appropriate process to keep productivity high and bug count low; dealing with technical debt; identifying portions of the codebase that won&#x27;t scale and replacing them with solutions that will; and all of the nitty-gritty organizational tasks needed to ensure that the engineering organization doesn&#x27;t grind to a halt.<p>The CTO role is a visionary one.  You&#x27;re responsible for looking outside the organization at new technological developments and deciding how they may impact the organization&#x27;s strategy; identifying new technical areas that warrant some exploratory investment; prototyping new systems, sometimes with the help of a small team of engineers who enjoy that stuff; and advocating for innovation within the organization.<p>Think of the role of Larry &amp; Sergey (technically Presidents of Product&#x2F;Technology, respectively) vs. Urs Hoelzle (VP Eng) at early Google.  Larry &amp; Sergey were responsible for making sure that things like GMail, Google Maps, 20% time, Chrome, etc. got funded and Keyhole, Android, Blogger, Writely, etc. got bought.  Urs instituted the engineering culture, made sure the right engineers got into the right roles and were able to be productive, technical debt got paid down (slowly), new systems were written as necessary to scale, etc.<p>The CTO role, properly defined, is the <i>perfect</i> place to kick a technical founder upstairs and yet still retain their expertise in innovation.  The problem is that many CEOs conflate the two roles, assign VP responsibilities to a CTO with a personality type more suited for the CTO role, never hire a real VP, and then wonder why the organization devolves into chaos.  If you&#x27;re doing it right the bulk of the engineering organization should report up through the VP of Engineering and the CTO should have only a small number of special-projects reports.