How to Become a VP of Engineering: The Three Gaps

Not long ago, a VP of Engineering at a scale-up wrote me. He wants mentoring for one of his senior engineering managers. Let’s call the manager Filip.

The email named three development areas. Paraphrased: Filip argues for his team instead of the department. Filip delivers what was agreed but doesn’t shape what comes next. Filip hears feedback as an attack.

I read it twice. Not because it surprised me. Because after 3,400+ sessions with 300+ engineering leaders, I could have written it blind. It is the same email every time. Different company, different name, same three gaps.

And here is the part nobody tells Filip: everything that made him a great EM is what keeps him out of the VPE seat. The fight for his team. The flawless delivery. The thick skin. All three are EM virtues. Unchanged, they cap you at EM.

The email every VP eventually writes

Career guides answer “how to become a VP of engineering” with rungs and tenure. I keep a different source: the emails VPs write me about the managers they almost promoted.

The VP of Engineering job description is written in the feedback you get when you are not ready.

Flip each complaint and you get the job: argue for the department, propose direction, show that feedback changed you. That is what the VPE role owns, described through its absence.

So let’s take the gaps one by one. With what I lived, not what I read.

Gap 1: You fight for your team. A VPE sometimes rules against it.

Watch a strong EM in a cross-team resourcing meeting. They win the argument. Their team keeps the headcount. Everyone nods at their advocacy.

The VPE in that room saw something else: a leader who cannot yet be given the department, because every trade-off ends with their own team winning.

This is the nuance most “leadership presence” advice misses. Presence is which side you argue when the trade-off costs your own people. Scope is granted. Allegiance is shown.

When I joined Mews as VP of Engineering in April 2020, I did not arrive with a plan for a favorite team. I spent two months only listening, then published an internal audit and mission streams for the whole department: scalability, delivery, awareness. Some teams lost out in that plan. My job was to defend all of them, not one.

Filip’s move: in the next cross-team forum, argue one position that costs your team something and helps the department. Once. Out loud. The people deciding promotions notice this faster than any deliverable.

Gap 2: You ship the roadmap. A VPE questions it.

The cruelest pattern I see in mentoring: the EM who executes perfectly is invisible at promotion time.

They shipped every commitment. Their sprint metrics are clean. And nobody has ever heard them answer the only VPE-level question: what should we be doing that is not on the roadmap yet?

Executing a plan someone else wrote is a delivery skill. Writing the plan, defending the trade-offs to the exec team, and being accountable when the bet fails: that is direction. The two look similar from below and completely different from above.

At Mews, direction meant changing the machine, not shipping tickets. We rebuilt the org around cross-functional product teams and put real-time delivery data in front of the whole company. Interviews alone took roughly 40% of my capacity while we grew toward 100 people.

That org rebuild is what moved the numbers: four months in, sprint completion was up 30% and average cycle time down 36%. Not because I coded anything. Because the machine changed.

Filip’s move: bring one proposal nobody asked for to your next leadership meeting. A number, a problem, a bet. Wrong is survivable. Silent is invisible.

Gap 3: You defend your record. A VPE mines the feedback.

Here is what defensiveness looks like from the other side of the 1:1 table. The VP shares hard feedback. The manager explains the context, corrects the details, cites the deliverables. Every fact right. And the VP quietly closes the promotion case, because the one signal that matters never arrived: evidence the feedback landed.

To the person deciding your next role, openness to feedback is not a soft skill. It is the load test. They are about to hand you a job where the feedback gets harsher, more public, and more political. If a manager assessment bruises you, an exec team will break you.

The counter-move is embarrassingly simple: act on one piece of feedback where people can see it. When I wrote my first-year Mews retrospective, I published my mistakes in it: wrong sequencing of improvements, involving team leads in interviewing too late. Nobody respected me less. Several people trusted me more.

The three gaps, side by side:

The self-test: three questions after your next exec meeting

Run it after your next cross-functional or leadership meeting. Answer honestly:

1. Did I argue any position that cost my team something?
2. Did I bring anything that was not already on the agenda or the roadmap?
3. What did I do with the last piece of hard feedback I received, and who saw me do it?

Three noes means you are a strong EM. Three noes, three meetings in a row, means the email about you is already drafted.

The ladder is real. It is also not the point.

The standard answer says EM, then Senior EM or Director, then VP, across a decade or more. Emily Nakashima, who lived the transition at Honeycomb, describes the VP role as contextual: the right VP depends on the company, and part of getting there is timing and luck. She is right, and her honesty beats most of the genre.

But the ladder framing hides the useful truth: companies promote the person who already behaves one level up. Filip does not need the Director title to close his three gaps. He can close all three this quarter, as an EM, in the meetings he already attends. The title is a lagging indicator. So is the Director rung itself: in a 40-person org it often is the VPE job wearing a smaller label.

Which brings me back to the email. My favorite detail is who sent it. Not Filip. His VP, arranging mentoring for Filip’s growth out of his own budget. That is what rooting for you looks like. And the feedback is the syllabus.

If you just recognized yourself in Filip, that syllabus is what we work through in mentoring. The intro session is free.