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