< Arnaud.works

The Team

I am going to approach this chapter just like the Product one. Structuring it using the three role I described in the trifecta:

  1. Product

  2. Engineering

  3. Project

Make sure to check out the trifecta chapter in the principles, as I want to dive into practical details you won't be able to understand without the context.

I'm going to use terminology and definitions I've covered in the 'Roles, Titles and Individuals' section of the principles, so have a look before continuing if you haven't already.

To describe the roles below, and make sure we are starting this on the same page, here are the duties that define each of these role names:

  1. Individual contributor is the individual that actually does the building work. The coding, the planning, the scoping. In engineering, that's everyone with 'engineer' or 'developer' in their title regardless of their seniority. Many Product Managers and Project Managers are individual contributors despite the title. That's because they are directly contributing to the product being built, and they don't have people management duties.

  2. Manager is the first people manager level. You are managing your product/project/stack and direct contributors. Hopefully in the sweet spot zone of 5 to 10 people.

  3. Director is the first manager of managers level. You run a department/sub-division, and have managers reporting to you. You may have a few individual contributors reporting as well.

  4. VP is the first strategic executive. You run one or multiple department focusing on execution at scale. You're 80% on execution, 20% on strategy. You have mostly managers or directors reporting to you.

  5. C-Suite (CTO, CPO, CPTO, etc) is the final stage. You own everything underneath you. You're 20% execution, 80% strategy. You represent the company publicly and internally. You mostly manage managers, director and or VPs. You're hardly hands-on. You're likely in board meetings. In some cases, you can be in this level without a Chief* title. If you look at Apple, the 'C-Suite' are all SVP for instance.

  6. Founder goes without explanation. It's a bit of an outlier in the structure, but worth covering nonetheless.

Try to find yourself in this structure based on your duties rather than your title as it will be the way to find what's relevant to you.

For instance, if you are a CTO in 10-ish people company, you're probably closer to the manager than the actual C-Suite role I'm discussing here - and there is nothing wrong with that.