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.
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)
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.
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.