Jason M. Lemkin argues founders shouldn't try to be VP of engineering themselves. As products grow, technical debt and complexity make it impossible for one person to handle both roles. Hire a strong VP of engineering to manage scaling and recruiting, freeing you to focus on next-generation product strategy.
Chapters
I don't need a VP of engineering. Trust me on this. If you don't think you need any of the VPs, sales, engineering, marketing, product, CS, go meet with 10 great ones. Great ones. Because what you realize is the great ones just let you scale. You— how much time are you spending refactoring the code base? How much of your time are you spending fixing old crummy code that you wrote or thing that didn't scale? It's great that you know how to do that, but someone else can do that. Go build the next generation stuff that no one could understand. Bring in a VP of engineering that can do all the, the, the routine parts of the job. The VP of engineering, they can spend half their time recruiting and you will just fly. So you think you're this great product strategist, but I will tell you founders, as the product gets bigger, more complex, you get to be a worse and worse VP of product. There's too much going on. It's too complicated.