alt Hacker NewsI’m a big fan of the idea of an Office of the CTO group reporting directly to the CTO that helps with prototyping greenfield projects and exploring innovative ideas. I believe a group like this would be beneficial for larger organizations, like the one I work in. There are numerous opportunities for market disruption, but it becomes increasingly challenging to make bold bets as the company expands. If I had the power to do so, I’d set this up at my company asap.
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Nokia had exactly this kind of CTO office during the 2005 - 2012 years when they lost the entire smartphone market.
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.
Cloudflare has an org whose job it is to do this sort of stuff.
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.