Jason M. Lemkin advises founders to hire a VP of Engineering so they can stop spending time on routine operational engineering work (refactoring, fixing legacy code, building next-gen systems) and instead focus on higher-level product and strategy. He argues great VPs let founders scale, spend significant time on recruiting, and free founders from becoming ineffective as product complexity grows.
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 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 much complicated.
