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Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

I’m a big fan of the idea of an Office of the CTO group reporting directly to the CTO that helps with prototyping greenfield projects and exploring innovative ideas. I believe a group like this would be beneficial for larger organizations, like the one I work in. There are numerous opportunities for market disruption, but it becomes increasingly challenging to make bold bets as the company expands. If I had the power to do so, I’d set this up at my company asap.

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If that group is necessary then it's a damning indictment of the product/engineering culture. The CTO's job should be to fix the broken culture, not try to side-step it.

Not every company is a product/engineering company.

A CTO is a common title at medium and larger law firms, and an office of the CTO for that org sounds like a great idea.

Hard disagree. Culture isn’t the problem, org structure is. You can call it an experiment or even a hack. Every team is already innovating within their scope, and splitting becomes easier as that scope grows.

What is too much is asking an Engineering Manager to start a completely independent product line that may go nowhere. It’s far more effective to rely on senior, staff+ engineers who don’t need management and have experience taking things from 0 to 1. They can build an MVP quick. Once we see real signals of PMF, we can then build a team around it (or drop it)

You’re right but you’re in the wrong place to argue this. Bezos has a talk where he famously talks about instituting weblabs and A/B testing because he doesn’t want to be a decision bottleneck and wants low stakes experiments with little friction.

But HN now is full of people completely removed from any kind of entrepreneurial mindset, people who aren’t “hackers” even in the most generous sense. They will not agree.

Keyboard warriors is probably the best descriptor of HN demo now.

Nokia had exactly this kind of CTO office during the 2005 - 2012 years when they lost the entire smartphone market.

The CTO fiddled with greenfield projects that had no path to products while the house burned down.

The best that can be said about it is that inventions outside of the product helped beef up Nokia’s patent portfolio, which played a role in the company surviving the post-phone years and transforming into a pure network company. But they lost a trillion-dollar opportunity and shrunk into an average B2B enterprise.

well you say that, but blackberry did exactly what you're saying Nokia should have done and we see how much that helped. Truth is iPhone was so far ahead technologically, no other company had a chance. At least Nokia still exists today, which can't be said about majority of other mobile phone manufacturers of that era.

Yes, but it wasn't iPhone that ate their markets, it was Android. Nokia and Blackberry were both at the top because they had their own operating systems, and while they were losing the high end market to iPhone, they would've kept the middle and low end markets where the volume was.

Android changed all that, all of the sudden all their competitors got a good OS for free. Commoditize your complement, Google took their markets.

Shouldn't this live under the VP of Product?

That’s a good point. Perhaps where this group lives depends on your organization. Unfortunately, the innovative ideas aren’t necessarily coming from product where I work.

No, product shouldn't be the head of an engineering team.

So you're argueing "prototyping greenfield projects and exploring innovative ideas" is something that should come solely out of engineering with no Product input?

That's not what I'm saying. There needs to be a collaboration with product ofc, product shouldn't be the boss though.

Should engineers be pushing product forward?

Traditionally that was R&D and its own department.

Having a CTO pet group isn’t the best use of the CTOs time. If you want to have better architecture and explore greenfield projects, you need an organization that supports R&D through cross functional groups.

A CTO should NOT be doing greenfield projects. A CTO should be setting technical vision and strategy for the entire company.

Cloudflare has an org whose job it is to do this sort of stuff.

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