The way I think about this that there’s three meta levels in organizations: The team that builds the product (devs, senior devs, lead devs). Build here usually

The way I think about this that there’s three meta levels in organizations: The team that builds the product (devs, senior devs, lead devs). Build here usually means code, design, ops. The team that builds the team that builds the products (engineering managers, principals, staff, directors of X, maybe VP of X). Build here usually means building up people (hiring, firing and training) and making technical decisions with an intent to educate and influence. Then there’s the team that builds the team that builds that builds the product. These are the CxOs, including CTO. The requisite skill here is engineering the organisation itself, not necessarily a fleet of services or APIs. This skill can benefit greatly from an engineering background (or just playing Factorio), but it’s broad enough that you also need to get into people management, psychology, marketing, selling (internally), consensus building etc. But it not directly related to code.