What does a VP of Engineering do, again?

“You mean he’s like an engineer-whisperer?”

Sorta.

Who is asking?

This question shows up over and over. And from all sides:

• the CEO who thinks her company is at the size that she should be “thinking” about hiring a VPE — the company is getting too big, and all of engineering still reports to her;
• the CTO who doesn’t want to manage people directly and is trying to figure out whether he needs a VPE to pair with — he feels that the best use of his time is to be the “chief architect”, “lead developer”, or “head prototyper”. The CTO often complains that he isn’t good at managing people, he isn’t scaling as a people manager as the team grows, that he finds people management is stressful, or he has no interest in doing it, and it’s a distraction;
• the first time VPE that is trying to figure out what she should be doing with her time — one-on-ones have already been scheduled, the current sprint has been planned, but what else should she be doing?; and, finally
• engineers who are concerned that the company wants to bring in “another level of management” — what does this do to their day to day? They often wonder what they’ve done wrong, or, whether they should be concerned that the company is getting “too large”.

Let’s pull this apart.

How is a VPE measured?

Execution. Full stop.

Everybody is going to be looking at the VPE to make sure he is making the trains run on time. Can he direct a team to ship high-quality software efficiently and on a predictable schedule? The VPE job is not to actually execute everything by himself, but rather to set up an environment so that execution gets easier, better, and faster over time.

So… how?

There are innumerable ways, but it can be boiled down to three priorities, in order:

1. establishing focus;
2. leading and designing the engineering org; and
3. representing engineering at the leadership level.

Focus starts from the top