1. CTO vs. VP of Engineering:
Whatʼs the Difference?
(And does it matter?)
Jason Hoffman Bryan Cantrill
CTO VP, Engineering
jason@joyent.com bryan@joyent.com
@jasonh @bcantrill

2. The genesis of this talk
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3. CTO vs. VP of Engineering
• In many startups especially, the difference between a CTO
and VP of Engineering becomes blurry
• There is often enough overlap that one person can do both
jobs when the company is tiny...
• ...but as a team expands, the need for distinct roles grows
• One is not necessarily subservient to the other — both roles
are critical and they must work as a team
• What are these roles?
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4. CTO?
• The CTO is the Chief Technology Officer, and in a startup,
will likely be the technical co-founder
• The CTO establishes the vision and culture
• The CTO must be as technical as required to validate the
vision and the culture
• Beyond this, the CTO is (or should be) largely outward
facing — the CTO should understand the relationship
between the technology and the larger world
• As a company grows and expands, the CTO will be at a
crossroads: become the VP of Engineering and hire a CTO,
or remain the CTO and hire a VP of Engineering
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5. VP of Engineering?
• The Vice President of Engineering is responsible for the
development and delivery of the product
• Critically, this includes the recruitment of the team
• Should be the exemplar of engineering
• Should be an engineer that the team feels comfortable
looking to on a wide range of technical problems
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6. So who innovates?
• Neither the CTO nor the VP of Engineering is singularly
responsible for innovation; they most foster it together
• They must create a culture (CTO) and a team (VP of
Engineering) that is empowered to think big
• Both CTO and VP of Engineering must — as a team —
embrace ideas, explore them and expand upon them
• The CTO must communicate them upward and outward
• The VP of Engineering must distill them into shipping
product or functional system
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7. Anti-patterns
• Because the specifics of the roles can vary significantly from
company to company, itʼs hard to prescribe one “right” way
to divide the CTO from VP of Engineering
• Easier to define the wrong way
• There are particular anti-patterns for these two roles that
seem to represent common failure modes
• Broadly, CTOs fail when they think that they are engineers,
not communicators; VPs of Engineering fail when they think
they are managers of people, not creators of useful things
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8. CTO Anti-pattern: The Critic
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9. VPoE Anti-pattern: The Process Queen
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10. CTO Anti-pattern: The Control Freak
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11. VPoE Anti-pattern: The No-Op
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12. CTO Anti-pattern: The Xenophobe
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13. VPoE Anti-pattern: The Upward Manager
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14. CTO Anti-pattern: The Creator
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15. VPoE Anti-pattern: The Cat Herder
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16. CTO Anti-pattern: The Space Ranger
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17. VPoE Anti-pattern: The Naysayer
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18. Thank you!
@jasonh
@bcantrill
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