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In my mind, titles are indeed the wrong place to start. Early on, we were pretty structureless — it was the best way to get things done. But as we grew, we fou
by gdb 12y ago
In my mind, titles are indeed the wrong place to start.
Early on, we were pretty structureless — it was the best way to get things done. But as we grew, we found that lack of structure started to get in the way — if everyone feels equally responsible for everything, then either no one or everyone jumps to solve any given problem. So we started specializing, and structures started to emerge or were designed to help support the amazing people we were hiring. I specialized in a lot of the things mentioned in the post.
A great piece of advice I've gotten about organizational change is to make it in two cases: either to formalize what already exists, or to solve a recognized problem that's causing active pain. My becoming CTO was very much the former (putting a word to what was already happening). Hiring in a VP Engineering, in contrast, was the latter.
Titles are one way of quickly summing up a particular specialization, and there are many ways of going wrong with them. But I'm just using them as a convenient handle here: the piece isn't about "someone slapped a CTO label on you, now what?", but instead something more like "you want to be a senior individual contributor as your company grows, how do you stay connected and make a big impact?".
- staunch 12y agoWith respect, I think you're deluding yourself a bit. The way you've described things, what you've done is hired a VP of Engineering to do most of your old job. It's a big change and you risk creating for yourself a (very boring) Chairman of Technology role if you're not careful.
- gdb 12y agoFor sure, with any change comes risk, but at a rapidly growing company there's even bigger risk with lack of change. (http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-old-guard/ http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-old-guard/ has some good perspective on this, I think.) In any case, of things that keep me up at night, falling into a boring role is definitely not one of them :).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- staunch 12y agoIt sounds like a good environment and you're thinking about the right issues. It will probably work out well. Good luck!
- sanderjd 12y agoThis is an interesting point. I'm curious what you see as the better alternative. From the article, it seems that hiring a VP Engineering was absolutely the right call, both for the company and for himself. Also from the article, the right thing for the company and himself seems to be for him to be involved at something more than an individual contributor level. What would you suggest as the alternative for someone in that position? If a VP/Director Engineering type role isn't the best fit for a technical founder or early engineer, should they regress to an individual contributor's role or should they move on to a new gig, or what?