VP Engineering(or CTO) responsibilities

Once upon a time, CPO asked me what my current activities are and I did not have an exact answer. It was so unusual for me because I really like to structure everything and know all the detailed answers. On a position of a technical coordinator / VP Engineering (or you can call it CTO), I have so many different types of activities that are difficult to structure.

Let’s try to group them (an important remark: these activities are what I’m doing, but I’m not saying that it’s a MUST for CTO ):

Technical vision

  • Develop a technical strategy for the company
    • platform selection and technical design
    • specifying tools
    • project architecture, code structure, the data structure
  • High-level technical overview
  • Performance analysis
  • Security audit
  • Reduce costs

Recruitment & Brand development

  • looking for smart people in the network
  • interview process
  • building a school of own trainees
  • communication with external recruitment agencies
  • organizing/support conferences/meetups
  • organizing different team building activities

Knowledge sharing & Self-education

  • Identify and exploit new technologies
  • grow technical leaders
  • track progress
  • build individual Development Plan
  • project-application knowledge sharing
  • reevaluation procedure

Process

  • setup agile process, make adjustments if needed
  • assure department/team is self-sufficient in terms of resources
  • participate in company roadmap planning