383: Working better with your CTO for innovation – with Steve Orrin Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

How CTOs contribute to innovation and product management superiority

Today we are talking about senior roles that contribute to innovation, specifically the role of CTO (Chief Technology Officer). Product managers and leaders interact with many people in their organizations, and knowing how to leverage professional relationships is important to success.

Joining us is Steve Orrin, CTO at Intel. Steve orchestrates and executes customer engagements in the federal space, overseeing the development of products to address challenges in government enterprise, national security, and other federal areas of focus. He has a reputation as an industry leader, leveraging a history of delivering results in Innovation, Intrapreneurship, and Entrepreneurship. 

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[1:52] What’s your role like as Federal Chief Technology Officer (CTO)?

My role is to be the interface between federal customers, the ecosystem that services them, our product line, and the product managers, engineering teams, and executives. I help translate and architect our technologies to match government’s missions and unique challenges. I lead our innovation teams, which are working directly with government customers on technical challenges. This comes in two forms: federalized commercial technology, which is modifying technology that works in other industries for the federal problem set, and pathfinding on new capabilities.

[5:43] How have you seen the CTO role differ in different organizations?

I’ve seen four types of CTO roles:



* The startup CTO is the Jack of all trades. Their role is to get their hands dirty and initiate the innovation that leads to the first prototype. The CTO typically comes up with the first novel idea upon which everything gets built. Next, it’s important to collaborate early with product management and engineering to get a product from the prototype into the market and continue innovation to introduce future capabilities and evangelize what the product does. As a startup CTO, one of my first hires is a product manager, a key role in finding the requirements that meet the minimum viable product. After that, I bring in a VP of engineering who oversees the architects and developers.

* The CTO in a more established, larger company drives innovation and the incubation team. Once you have your product established, the CTO looks for the next big opportunity.

* The product-line CTO in large organizations owns a particular technology or product category. This is an evolution of the second type above to a larger scale. The field CTO is closely aligned with the sales and business development teams. They do technical evangelism, speak to customers, and become the voice of the customer to the organization.

* The fourth type is a blending of the other three roles, and is most closely aligned to my role. It involves product evangelism, being the voice of the customer, and driving innovation.



[11:56] Can you compare and contrast your role as CTO with the roles of product VPs or product officers?

At Intel, I work with product managers, engineering managers, and engineering directors. I think about now, next, and after. The VP of engineering is focused on now—building the product with the current requirements to get it out the door with the maximum amount of bug fixes in a particular timeframe with particular resources. The product manager is focused on the next—the key customer requirements we need to solve to continue to be viable and the bug fixes critical for customers. The next phase of innovation or after comes from the CTO.

The CTO must manage the balance between product management, innovation, and engineering. The CTO is thinking about the next big non-organic growth opportunity, while the product manager is focused on solving the current customer’s problems,