Even with the greatest product ideas, if you can't build and launch your product, it remains just an idea. So, your relationship with the engineering organization is all important.
In this chapter, I describe the leader of the engineering organization. I had the good fortune to collaborate on this chapter with one of Silicon Valley's most successful CTOs, Chuck Geiger.
I have often said that, if as product manager you have a good working relationship with your engineering counterpart, then this is a great job. If you don't, you're in for some very tough days. So, in the spirit of developing a better appreciation for what makes a great technology organization, we offer this summary.
First, let's be clear which organization we're referring to. This is the organization responsible for architecture, engineering, quality, site operations, site security, release management, and usually delivery management. This group is responsible for building and running the company's products and services.
The titles vary but often include VP engineering, or chief technology officer (CTO). In this chapter, we'll refer to the head of this organization as the CTO, but feel free to substitute the term your company uses.
Even with the greatest product ideas, if you can't build and launch your product, it remains just an idea.
There is one title, however, that is often a problem: the chief information officer (CIO). The CIO role is very different from the CTO role. In fact, if your technology organization reports to the CIO, that is a warning flag for many of the pathologies discussed in Chapter 6, “The Root Causes of Failed Product Efforts.”
The hallmark of a great CTO is a commitment to continually strive for technology as a strategic enabler for the business and the products. Removing technology as a barrier, as well as broadening the art of the possible for business and product leaders, is the overarching objective.
To that end, there are six major responsibilities of a CTO. We present them here in priority order and discuss how each is typically measured.
Build an excellent organization with a strong management team committed to developing the skills of your employees. We typically measure effectiveness here by looking at development plans for all the employees, the retention rate, and the evaluation of the managers and the overall product and technology organization by the rest of the company.
Represent technology in the overall strategic direction and leadership of the company, working with other company executives to help inform direction, M&A activity, and build/buy/partner decisions.
Make sure this organization can rapidly, reliably, and repeatedly deliver quality product to market. There are several measures of delivery, including the consistency and frequency of release vehicles, and the quality/reliability of the delivered/launched software. The main obstacle to rapid delivery is often technical debt, and it is the responsibility of the CTO to ensure that the company is keeping this at a manageable level and not allowing the problem to cripple the organization's ability to deliver and compete, which is discussed next.
Make sure the company has an architecture capable of delivering the functionality, scalability, reliability, security and performance it needs to compete and thrive. In companies that have multiple product lines or vertical business units, the CTO needs to be the leader in a cohesive technology strategy looking at the sum, and not just the parts. The CTO is the orchestrator of a company‐wide technology strategy. The measures for architecture will vary based on your business, but in general, we look to ensure that the infrastructure is continuously monitored and advanced to keep pace with the growth of the business, and we measure outages that impact our customers that are due to infrastructure or architectural issues.
Make sure that members of the senior engineering staff are participating actively and contributing significantly throughout product discovery. If your engineers and architects are only being used to write software, then you are only getting a fraction of the value from them you should be. We encourage you to keep an eye on the participation of the engineering organization in product discovery (both duration and coverage) and follow the frequency of innovations credited to the engineering participant.
The CTO will serve as the company spokesperson for the engineering organization, demonstrating leadership in the community with developers, partners, and customers. Leadership of this type can be measured by establishing a university relations/recruitment program and sponsoring or participating in several events per year in the developer community.
You may want to go to lunch with your engineering counterpart and discuss what they see as their biggest challenges and how you might be able to help from the product side. Anything you can do to help each other out will go a long way to creating a truly effective overall product organization, able to discover and deliver winning products.