Team Lead / Engineering Manager

It is the role in the company that is responsible of a team and ensures an efficient development by applying good practices and philosophy. He is the captain of the team who ensures the proper management and delivery of their part of the project. Manages 4 to 7 people.

Team lead also forms part of the community with other Team Leads. They should contribute to the success of another part of the project that is managed by another lead.

That person can be fully managing or partially hands-on. If he works along with the team, he has the opportunity to see what really happens internally and make him feel more part of the team.
If the lead is 100% managing doesn't feel the pains of the most common processes of the coworkers he is in charge.

Technical director

group various TL teams. Responsible of areas. Ensures quality, efficiency, standardization between teams, investigate strategical and tactical components for improvement.

#VP of technology handles a whole Business Unit. He has mainly an strategical objective with years of forecast. Provides new business opportunities and scouts new technologies.

Chief Technical Officer (CTO)

Last responsible for the executive council that looks for maximizing company profit from the technological side. Due to he is part of the council, takes HHRR decisions, financial, etc. He is deeply exposed to business. Depending on the company you may have different responsibilities.

Adaptability and experimentation

Depending on the moment of the company, team, and project you have to adapt to the current challenges. If we are in a startup, a company that is starting, we will probably need to spend part of the time hands-on coding the application, we won't have enough time to ensure the complete quality of the code, mentor the team, etc. If we are in a consolidated company with well defined processes and structured teams, we won't invest timing coding and we could focus on higher level technological and business processes.

If there was a valid guide to apply to generic decisions CTO role wouldn't be needed. This is the reason we need a person to take decisions based on certain environments with high uncertainty. For Defined problems, those that all aspects of the problem are properly defined, we can apply guides. For uncertain problems where definition comes from experimentation, we have to apply empirical method: observe, plan, test and evaluate.