What does a VP of Engineering do?
I have been asked this question numerous times over the 6 or so years that I have been in a VP of Engineering role. When I was first new to this role, I struggled in articulating what it is that I truly do, let alone a VP of Engineering does. The job felt like a whirlwind of activities focused on “shipping product”, which made it relatively easy to list the various functions that the role does. The challenge was articulating those into a framework that truly captures what the role does. In time, perhaps stemming from experience, collaborating with peers and countless mistakes, I have come to a framework that describes what it is I do.
Before I dive into the framework, I’d like to offer a pithy statement that captures the essence of the role.
The role of the VP of Engineering is to build and maintain the system that develops the products and services a business requires
The framework that encompasses the various parts of this system, is one I call the 4Ps: people, process, product and potpourri. I will give a brief description of each part of this system. My descriptions will also cover various questions, or challenges, that each of the system’s part tries to “solve” or optimize.
People
One of the more critical responsibilities of a VP of Engineering is in building the engineering team. It’s fair to say that anywhere from 25-40% of my time is spent in recruiting activities. Team building doesn’t stop with recruiting, in fact that’s the starting point. The ultimate goal of the activities that fall under the people category is to ensure that the team is happy, motivated and growing. Growth here being a function of headcount as well as personal development. As such, a VPE will be focused on many people related activities some of which are outlined in the sections below.
Organizational design
This involves trying to define the manner in which individuals with the team are organized. Are individuals grouped into teams based on the functional area(s) of the product that they work on? Or are they organized as vertical squads? Yet another alternative is to have a hybrid approach, whereby some teams are functionally oriented whereas others are vertically oriented.
One critical aspect of organizational design arises in the early days of an engineering team’s lifetime: the addition of managers. It is not atypical for engineering teams at early stage startups to not have managers - everybody reports to the CTO/VPE. Transitioning from this modus operandi to one in which one or more managers are added can be destabilizing and alien to the team. That’s something a VPE can help the team navigate. Ultimately. the VPE needs to be thinking of how to evolve the organization to ensure that it can scale to meet the (hopefully growing) demands of the business.
Values & Culture
The VPE helps define and facilitate the emergence of the engineering team’s values and culture. These are the set of principles that acts as a north star for the organization. They are critical in decision making. Values can help with making hiring decisions, feature readiness, product quality, product design and more. This is a good read on product specific values and how they help with product related decision making. The same can be applied to decisions that impact a team or organization, the values are just at a higher level of abstraction.
Growth & Development
There are numerous activities that are concerned with the growth and development of the individuals in the engineering organization. These include setting up programs for hiring and interviewing process, onboarding new hires, compensation, promotions, mentoring,
Process
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