On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Many organizations have dozens or hundreds of vice
presidents, like Vice
President of Vending Machines and Vice President of Pencil Sharpeners.
Heh. I've certainly been in the VP of Odds and Ends role before. :)
A little bit of context. As Stu and Kaldari mentioned, the VP title is
fairly common in the US, where it's actually often situated below the
"C-level" in the org. The reason Sue and I agreed on the title VP of
Engineering/Product for the engineering department has more to do with
the organizational vocabulary in this part of the world, where that
title does carry a very specific meaning relative to the CTO title.
You can read more about the differences in these posts:
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/want-to-know-difference-between-a-cto-an…
http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2007/10/cto-vs-vp-engineering.html
http://falseprecision.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/10/cto-vs-vp-engin.html
Right now, we don't have a CTO, but we do have three Lead Architects
in the engineering department (Mark, Brion, and Tim). We may choose to
ultimately create a CTO role again, but it would probably be different
from the way we've treated that role in the past (as architectural
lead/visionary and process/delivery manager combined into one person).
We may also need to split the product/engineering responsibilities if
scale requires it.
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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