Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 20, 2010
This time I thought I’d try and address engineering talent. Often I’m asked by startup CEO’s about how to best build an engineering team. I hope many will read this and have an answer for the question, “what’s the different between a CTO and a VP of Engineering?&#.
www.bothsidesofthetable.com
MAY 13, 2012
Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? This time I thought I’d try and address engineering talent. Often I’m asked by startup CEO’s about how to best build an engineering team. You still have some leeway to hire above them if need be. Raising Venture Capital.
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Steve Blank
JULY 11, 2017
They make hardware with a large part of their innovation in embedded software and services. The CFO asked me to stay as one of the engineering directors came in for a meeting. So, this was a meeting of last resort, as the engineering director was making one last appeal to the CFO to keep his team in town. I wish I hadn’t.
Steve Blank
JANUARY 25, 2011
The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. In reality this is a fools choice.
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 13, 2018
If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing – you’re no longer the most important employee, and process, meetings, paperwork and managers and bosses have shown up. The company was going to hire a VP of Marketing.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 30, 2008
So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question.
Steve Blank
JUNE 25, 2009
Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.) They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. Their engineers hated us.
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