VP of Engineering

Working yourself out of your role: the succession plan

In order to take on new opportunities and grow in their career, the author learned to create a succession plan to transition their current role to someone else. This enabled them to take on broader responsibilities and move on from their current role. The author recommends writing the succession plan as soon as possible, revisiting it regularly, and having a mutual understanding of each other's roles with their team of managers.

In Need of Extra Hands: Hiring Independent Contractors and External Vendors

When needing to hire additional capacity or expertise, it is important to secure the hiring budget, identify contractors or vendors, vet their quality, and be prepared on the logistical, product, and engineering side. Contracting is a good opportunity to make the right hire and it is important to ensure that the regular team knows and understands what the contractors are building.

Make Hard Time Easier -- Work With a Sponsor

When the company needed to bring in a more experienced CTO, the Product Development team, including the author, had to go through a difficult transition. The author was able to recruit a technical advisor as the new CTO, and through their relationship, the author was able to learn valuable lessons about asking for and listening to feedback, challenging and disagreeing with their manager, and using what they learned to help turn their next manager into a sponsor.

The Ambiguous Role of a CTO

The role of a CTO is often difficult to understand, as it can involve managing people, technology, or customers. It is important to understand the distinct approach to the role that is context-dependent and varies from company to company. It is possible to be good at all three, but it is impossible to be great. It is important to find an alignment between what you like and what you are good at, and to hire people to fill in the other positions or allocate those responsibilities to other managers. Introspection and understanding what kind of CTO you are/should be is key, and multitasking is never a good idea.

Achieving Alignment and Efficiency Through a Technical Strategy

A fast-growing company was facing a lack of clarity and confusion about future decisions, leading to inefficiency. To solve this problem, a technical strategy was developed that detailed what should and shouldn't be done to be successful in the long run. This involved reaching out to different people to better understand the reasons behind slow decision-making, tailoring presentations to suit two different audiences, and establishing a process for teams and a "design and architecture" group to collaborate on designs. Lessons learned included the importance of securing buy-in before decision-making meetings, reviewing past decisions, customizing content for different audiences, and documenting decisions and guidelines.

From Putting Out Fires To Preventing Them

VP of Engineering at Le Tote faced operational issues and was paged in the middle of the night. To reduce the number of issues, metrics were measured and integrated with the system to provide visibility and move from reactive to proactive work. This helped to drive change and showed the importance of reducing friction to embrace change.