Ask HN: CTO and Product Engineering Manager
I'm currently the CTO of a small (7 empl) saas company in spain. We are three founders and an advisor who has little shares. After 3 years of working hard, we finally have a product that people likes and we have had some sales (about 100K soft+services). We are on the way to receive some seed investment, and the advisor told us to get some loans from the government. Until here, everything is fine, after 3 years of scarcity and courange, we will finally have some resources that will help us to bring our software to a next level and expand its adoption.
The advisor told us about creating and organization chart, to see how we will spend the money. And he proposes the figure of a "product engineering manager", someone responsible of some R+D, vintage chart, and pilot test. That job was made by me until now, basically because after some years I got some expertise on the market, and I tried to push some cool "intelligent" features, but due to the small resources, we focused on minimum viable product.
After being told that I would no longer hold this position/job, the advisor proposed someone younger (we are all 28), but who has been working for 3 years in a very similar companies in the U.S. He had an outsourced development team of 30, and they got a nice piece of software. They focused on final client (12 clients), we got a sales channel (35 partners) and (70 final clients) and the amount of items represented in the software was about the same (150). He was supossed to have a bigger salary also.
I've said that now we lack of someone to take care of the operations, someone to help the sales channel to setup projects and deploy our software (our software needs some piece of hardware) for really going on volume. But the advisor (and also the CEO-sales manager) told me that what we have to do is to focus more on the R+D on the product.
I'm feeling displaced from the position I think I could bring to the next step with some extra resources, and I supose I will end giving support to the sales channel, while someone else plays around with some R+D unit that I've been trying to push for the last year. So, I expressed some doubts on this decisition, and I got a confrontation with the rest of my board (founders and advisor). I even being told by the advisor that if someone gets an advisor he cannot refuse their advices. He added that he is very angry at me, and that I'm putting sticks on the wheels.
So, to wrap it all, I face a decistion, wether I fight for the position I think I must work in, or I got displace for the best of the company.
Ah, just forgot to tell one thing, which is supposed to be irrelevant the supposed rockstar to be hired as product engineering manager is the son of the advisor, with whom we have some common friends that told me that he is desperate to come back to spain.
So, what I have to do?
Thanks!