senior vice president usually is a people management type person, in charge of people, processes, and product (3 p's as they say in management lingo), in other

senior vice president usually is a people management type person, in charge of people, processes, and product (3 p's as they say in management lingo), in other words, hire and retain the best people, introduce proper workflows to make things more efficient, and make sure they're generating kick ass products on time, with high quality. this is often times can be confused with a cto's role, but i believe a cto's role is more independent, has less organizational obligations, in other words, manages much less people, at least at large companies. a cto's main role is to work more with customers, partners, evangelize products, and think about the longer term vision of the technology, this could be internal technology, like datacenters, to things like the next 5 year's software products. at small companies, i think you'll find cto's also doing the job of a svp along with marketing, sales, support, etc.