Preparing for Your First VP of Engineering Role | Honeycomb VPE, Emily Nakashima

**Emily Nakashima** (0:00)
I think that this was actually a mistake I made when I first took on an executive role where I really expected to show up representing my function. And fairly quickly, I went, oh, this is the wrong way to think about this.
Once I sort of switched and said, hey, this is a team that's trying to solve a problem together. And most of the time, we actually can kind of like set aside the hat that we wear when we're out in the rest of the company and just sort of work together as, you know, five people who have different expertise but are trying to solve the same problem. And it ended up being a much healthier approach.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:27)
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This workshop will delve into the data behind effective goal setting, strategies elite engineering organizations use, successful companies that are using goal setting, plus provide a free how-to guide and reporting slide deck for you to leverage. You can register today at the link in the description. I hope to see you there. Hey everyone, welcome back to Dev Interrupted, live from leading end SF. I'm your cohost, Conor Bronsdon, and I'm joined today by Emily Nakashima. Emily is the VP of engineering at honeycomb.io, also known as Honeycomb. Emily, thanks for coming on the show.

**Emily Nakashima** (1:21)
Really happy to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:22)
It's my pleasure because you have a background in product engineering, performance optimization, client-side monitoring, design, and I love that you kind of describe yourself as this DevTools nerd because frankly, so are we here. We love talking to folks like yourself.
And I understand that you have identified a misconception that you're seeing in how we all apply not just DevTools, but Dev organizations. Because we talk a lot about how CTO roles can vary company to company. Some CTOs sit over multiple VPs of engineering and they're running the whole engineering org. Others have a kind of special ops group. Or maybe some other roles here where they're focused on security. There's a variety of ways you can look about it, depending on the size of the company, type of company. Yet we like to think about VPs of engineering as kind of standard. Like, okay, your VP of engineering, yeah, your size of the company may be different.
You don't think that's the case. You think there's a difference between VP of engineering across the board.

**Emily Nakashima** (2:20)
I do think that. And I don't think it's just developer tools companies. I really think, especially startups, but really any kind of scaling company, I think so often the roles are really defined by who's there and what the organization does well. You know, there's this real understanding because we've sort of, I think, idolized founders and CTOs that we have sort of become more aware of all the different shapes.
But you know, the reality is that the VP of engineering could take on almost as many shapes as the CTO. And I don't want people to miss that because I think people can either be drawn to the opportunity for the wrong reasons, or they can sort of think it's not for them because they have the wrong picture in their head of what it could be.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:55)
Well, let me just say to VPs of engineering who are watching and listening, we think about you too. We were big fans.
And that's why, Emily, I'm really glad you're here to kind of talk to us about some of this almost antiquated views of the role that we have. How do you think about the VP of engineering role? How does it break down for you?

**Emily Nakashima** (3:12)
I do think that, you know, some of the kind of sort of maybe stereotype that people have in their head, there is some truth in that. I think in general this idea that the VP of engineering is the lead manager for either engineering as a whole in a smaller company or a portion of the technical teams in a larger company, it rounds to true most places I think.
I think that the thing that people miss is how much the actual role is shaped by other people on the leadership team.
And sometimes other people who aren't on the leadership team too. Probably if you think about the VP and CTO relationship, that kind of makes more sense naturally to people.