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.