Not long ago, a VP of Engineering at a scale-up wrote me. He wants mentoring for one of his senior engineering managers. Let’s call the manager Filip.
The email named three development areas. Paraphrased: Filip argues for his team instead of the department. Filip delivers what was agreed but doesn’t shape what comes next. Filip hears feedback as an attack.
I read it twice. After 3,400+ sessions with 300+ engineering leaders I could have written it blind, it’s the same email every time. Different company, different name, same three gaps.
What nobody tells Filip is that everything that made him a great EM, the fight for his team, the flawless delivery, the thick skin, is exactly what now keeps him out of the VPE seat. Unchanged, those virtues cap you at EM.
The email every VP eventually writes
Career guides answer “how to become a VP of engineering” with rungs and tenure. I keep a different source: the emails VPs write me about the managers they almost promoted. In practice, the VPE job description is written in the feedback you get while you’re not ready yet. Flip each complaint and you get the job: argue for the department, propose direction, show that feedback changed you. That’s what the VPE role owns, described through its absence.
Let’s take the gaps one by one, with what I lived through at Mews, as opposed to what the career guides recycle.
Gap 1: You fight for your team. A VPE sometimes rules against it.
Watch a strong EM in a cross-team resourcing meeting. They win the argument, their team keeps the headcount, everyone nods at their advocacy.
The VPE in that room saw something else: a leader who can’t yet be given the department, because every trade-off ends with their own team winning.
This is the nuance most “leadership presence” advice misses. What the people above you actually read is which side you argue when the trade-off costs your own people.
When I joined Mews as VP of Engineering in April 2020, I didn’t arrive with a plan for a favorite team. I spent two months only listening, then published an internal audit and mission streams for the whole department: scalability, delivery, awareness. Some teams lost out in that plan. My job was to defend all of them, not one.
If I were mentoring Filip, his first homework would be this: in the next cross-team forum, argue one position that costs your team something and helps the department, out loud. The people deciding promotions notice that faster than any deliverable.
Gap 2: You ship the roadmap. A VPE questions it.
The cruelest pattern I see in mentoring: the EM who executes perfectly is invisible at promotion time.
They shipped every commitment, their sprint metrics are clean, and nobody has ever heard them answer the only VPE-level question: what should we be doing that isn’t on the roadmap yet?
Executing a plan someone else wrote is a delivery skill. Writing the plan, defending the trade-offs to the exec team, and being accountable when the bet fails, that’s direction. The two look similar from below and completely different from above.
At Mews, direction meant changing the machine rather than shipping tickets. We rebuilt the org around cross-functional product teams and put real-time delivery data in front of the whole company. Interviews alone took roughly 40% of my capacity while we grew toward 100 people.
That org rebuild is what moved the numbers: four months in, sprint completion was up 30% and average cycle time down 36%. I didn’t code any of it. The machine changed, and the numbers followed.
Filip’s version of this is much cheaper: bring one proposal nobody asked for to the next leadership meeting. A number, a problem, a bet. It can even be wrong, what hurts him is bringing nothing, because then the people above him never learn he thinks about direction at all.
Gap 3: You defend your record. A VPE mines the feedback.
Here’s what defensiveness looks like from the other side of the 1:1 table. The VP shares hard feedback. The manager explains the context, corrects the details, cites the deliverables. Every fact right. And the VP quietly closes the promotion case, because the one signal that matters never arrived: evidence the feedback landed.
To the person deciding your next role, openness to feedback is the load test. They’re about to hand you a job where the feedback gets harsher, more public, and more political. If a manager assessment bruises you, an exec team will break you.
The counter-move is embarrassingly simple: act on one piece of feedback where people can see it. When I wrote my first-year Mews retrospective, I published my mistakes in it: wrong sequencing of improvements, involving team leads in interviewing too late. Nobody respected me less. Several people trusted me more.
The three gaps, side by side:
| EM instinct | VPE behavior |
|---|---|
| Win resources for your team | Rule for the department, even against your old team |
| Deliver the committed roadmap | Propose what the roadmap misses, own the bet |
| Defend your record when challenged | Repeat the feedback back, change one behavior visibly |
The self-test: three questions after your next exec meeting
Run it after your next cross-functional or leadership meeting. Answer honestly:
- Did I argue any position that cost my team something?
- Did I bring anything that wasn’t already on the agenda or the roadmap?
- What did I do with the last piece of hard feedback I received, and who saw me do it?
Three noes means you’re a strong EM. Three noes three meetings in a row means the email about you is probably already drafted.
The ladder is real, but it’s not the point
The standard answer says EM, then Senior EM or Director, then VP, across a decade or more. Emily Nakashima, who lived the transition at Honeycomb, describes the VP role as contextual: the right VP depends on the company, and part of getting there is timing and luck. She’s right, and her honesty beats most of the genre.
What the ladder framing hides is that companies promote the person who already behaves one level up. Filip doesn’t need the Director title to close his three gaps, he can close all three this quarter, as an EM, in the meetings he already attends. The title is a lagging indicator. So is the Director rung itself, in a 40-person org it often covers what is effectively the VPE job.
Which brings me back to the email. My favorite detail is who sent it. Not Filip, his VP, arranging mentoring for Filip’s growth out of his own budget. That’s what rooting for you looks like, and the feedback itself is the syllabus.
If you just recognized yourself in Filip, that syllabus is what we work through in mentoring. The intro session is free.