#define CTO
>But universally, “sparse micromanagement” (the best term I’ve heard for jumping in to some random issue, overturning all the decisions, and then disappearing) is the worst.Great essay. My favorite term for this is "drive-by micromanagement.":)I think it's hard to make "chief architect" work out in the long term--if the role is too weak, it often becomes nothing more than an evangelist; if too strong, it often disempowers the people who are closest to the work.For figuring out what CTO means in an organization with a VP engineering, you might take some inspiration from Google's organizational history. Google never had a CTO, but they took care to establish ways for highly technical people to have huge impact without being forced onto the management track.The first was Google Fellow, a level of individual contributor equivalent in to a VP engineering. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are good examples; they didn't manage people, but they did work on very hard technologies like GFS, MapReduce, and BigTable that were used by the whole company, and later inspired projects like Hadoop. (In general, I think having a dual career ladder—one for ICs, and one for managers—is a good idea, and the "Fellow" model really just recognizes the fact that the best engineers are worth as much or more than the best managers.)The second model is essentially skunkworks: leading projects which are high-risk and important to Stripe's future, but far enough outside the main product that you want to treat it almost as a small startup. The first attempt at this were Googlettes, led by Georges Harik, which included projects like GMail, Google Talk, Orkut, and Google Mobile. At the time, those were very distant from search, but as they grew the successful projects became core to the company. The second version is Google X, where they're now expanding into very distant areas that involve hardware, biosensors, self-driving cars, etc. For Stripe, maybe the equivalent is something like cryptocurrencies, or physical payments, or something you've imagined by I haven't. :)Anyway, thanks for writing. I have a lot of admiration for Stripe's culture and so I hope you all keep blogging about it.