As I understood it, it is the CTO's role to make sure that the technology supports the business strategy. It's perfectly fine to have a VP of engineering run d

As I understood it, it is the CTO's role to make sure that the technology supports the business strategy. It's perfectly fine to have a VP of engineering run day to day management, in this case you have more time to immerse yourself in stripe's business strategy and find and eliminate bottlenecks there. According to the Stripe team page there are 160 people working there and engineering is the minority of it. I would be surprised if the other functional departments in your company are so optimised that they no longer have issues that technology can help remedy, these issues may accelerate the company or even prevent the company from reaching its objectives. e.g. the executives in charge of a department may lack visibility and have to beg for engineering time to get the analysis they need to do their jobs. Even worse, they may have already stopped asking for these insights and are now operating with limited insight. A great example of this is Max Levchin his initiative to tackle fraud at Paypal, a core strategic issue for them but it wasn't part of product or engineering.