| Not confrontational at all. In short, it's taken me years to be able to do this. Last year we finally got our engineering organization to a point where I no longer have any direct reports. Instead, everyone rolls up to our VP of engineering. In most mid-sized startups (like ours), the VP of engineering is the person that manages most of the process and generally makes sure the trains run on time. My view of the CTO role is that it's focused on more long term efforts or the product generally (in more technical companies). So that's what I've been doing for much of this year. With the caveat that I'm also the founder and on the board so there is still about 10 hours a week of executive meetings/management, reviewing of other people's writing & product efforts and working with our biggest customers and prospects. All that being said, I'm not just working on this because it's what I want to do and it's what excites me (which it does). I also think it's my highest point of leverage within the company. Very few people have the same view and in depth experience in this problem domain. Most of the people I know of that do are either founding and running competitive offerings or they're working on similar projects at Google, AWS, or Azure and getting paid significantly more than we can afford to pay a single engineer. I think this is one of our most important efforts right now and the best way I know to make it successful is to be working on it in depth. I'm not the best programmer on the team or the smartest, but I have some depth of experience that gives me a clear vision on what it should be able to do and what tradeoffs we should be making. My role on this effort is basically as the product person and the tech lead. In this case the tech lead isn't the manager of people on the team. We try to have a multiple paths for advancement in engineering and one of them tech focused individual contributor. Of course, I view this project as necessary, but not sufficient for our overall success. That's why most of our engineering team is working on our legacy products and the continued forward development of the overall platform. |