Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Unleash Your Potential: Why Founders Should Hire a VP of Engineering #business #businessstrategy

3 Dec 2023 · 1 min

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Jason M. Lemkin advises founders to hire a VP of Engineering so founders can stop doing routine engineering work (refactoring, fixing legacy code) and instead focus on high-level product and company strategy. He argues great VPs let companies scale by taking on recruiting, routine engineering leadership, and complex implementation details, freeing founders from becoming overloaded as product complexity grows.

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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. How much time are you spending refactoring the code base? How much of your time are you spend 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. Build the next generation stuff that no one could understand. Bring in a VP of engineering that can do all 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.