Nearly 60% of my clients are engineers or technologists in high-tech companies. Many of them are in their early 30s trying to figure out what career track to choose. There are four choices for many: Engineering management (e.g., VP Engineering), technology leadership (CTO), general management (GM, CEO), or to stay as an Individual Contributor (IC). Each career choice represents a very different mindset on how you need to go about that track and requiring different aptitudes. What I plan to provide in this blog is general guidance on how to approach this challenge with the right mental models, so that you can assess for yourself what track is best for you in the long run.
Although this blog is written for those in engineering it is broadly applicable to anyone who specializes in a technical area and wants to manage their career along similar tracks. Here, technical means an area that requires specialized expertise such as law, medicine, advertising, or entertainment. The respective titles in those professions would, of course, be quite different.
CTO Track: A chief technology officer is a technology visionary, who understands how technologies are emerging and how the one that they specialize in is going to impact the market in the near and long-term to create customer value. So, for a successful CTO they not only must understand their own technology in which they play a major role, but also all other adjacent technologies reasonably well to understand their interplay in the ecosystem that defines their business. So, someone deep in web-based technologies must understand with some detail technologies in software, machine learning, hardware, networking, communications, and user interfaces, just to name a few. Metaphorically, someone headed in the CTO track must be a master of his technology domain with strong understanding of how adjacent technologies—and even far-fetched ones—come together to formulate a compelling solution to a customer problem or to lead a market.
To continue that metaphor they are like an Olympic athlete that has mastered their sport. So, if you are into sprint relay then you are a fast runner, who can also run a 100-meter race. But, running is all that you do because you are the best runner in every way for you to win that Gold.
Typically, CTOs work as individual contributors; they do not have an army of technical people reporting to them. They seek out the talent they need by drawing from engineering, R&D, and other functional areas. Their teams are fluid and are mission-driven for each particular mission that the CTO chooses to pursue. They are also quite influential in how they sell their ideas to customers based on their technology vision and their problem framing and problem-solving savvy.
VP-E Track: For someone headed in this direction they must have a solid understanding of different technologies and functional areas. Functional areas include, mechanical engineering, reliability, packaging, quality, systems engineering, just to name a few. So, to continue the athlete metaphor, someone headed in the VP-E direction must see themselves as a Decathlon entrant in the Olympics. Here, they will be very good at each of the 10 athletic events, but not the best at any one in particular. They know how to optimize their energies to deliver the best Decathlon score, yet any one of the areas that they participate in could be easily overshadowed by the respective players, who are Gold medalists in their own right. So, a Decathlon champion is trained to optimize their talent for best overall performance, not any singular event within that cluster.
So, to be a successful VP-E the person must not only be strong (without having to be the best) in many technologies and functional areas listed above, but must also have high Emotional Intelligence (EQ) to manage a large team of professionals and to deal with the crises that arise on a variety of fronts without losing their cool. They also must learn to politically maneuver delicate situations arising with customers, higher-ups, and even the CTO, who can often get unreasonable in their demands to execute their visionary ideas with alacrity.
GM/CEO Track: For someone to pursue this track they must start within a functional area and prove their superiority in mastering that area of work. They must show superior intellect, not just in technical problem solving, but also in dealing with ambiguity, uncertainty, and in calling the right shots when there is a need to make a judgment call.
GM/CEO track is usually filled with people, who have done their MBA (not always a requirement in technology businesses) in early stages of their career evolution, and using that as a springboard have migrated into other functional areas of business usually not pursued by those who start as individual contributors (ICs) and become technical gurus in that area (CTO candidates do that).
GM/CEO track people usually display a great aptitude for their conceptual skills derived from having mastered one particular skill early in their career and then using that to rapidly expand their learning in other areas. Professionals on this track display not only great conceptual skills but also a broad perspective with which they look at a problem and deal with how to solve it. They are also very good at delegating (high EQ), managing difficult Political situations and people (high PQ), and display a strong understanding of the conteXt in which they are required to succeed (XQ).
So, with this simplified model on how to manage your career you have some basic insights on what is important in each track and how you want to assess your own proclivities to pursue the right track. Hope that this helps you!
Good luck!