How to Become a CTO Without the VP of Engineering Step

I ran the search this post is named after from a desk in Prague on 12 August 2026. Google answered with an AI Overview before it answered with any links, and the summary opened like this:

The path typically requires 10 to 15 years of experience progressing from developer to tech lead, engineering manager, and VP of Engineering.

Read the end of that sentence again. The question was how to become a CTO. The answer walks you to the seat next door and stops.

That is a fair summary of the whole first page, not a scraping accident. Underneath the AI Overview sit two university degree pages, a fractional CTO sales page, a certification body, a Reddit thread at number one and a couple of personal blogs. I read the top five in full. None of them narrates the step the question asks about.

So I counted our own member records instead. The seat that sentence treats as the last stop before the top job is the emptiest rung on our whole ladder.

The seat below the top job is not called VP here

Counted from the 840 member records carrying a structured job title, on 12 August 2026:

Layer	People
CTO	61
Head or Director of Engineering	99
VP with an engineering or technology scope	23 of 39 VP titles in total

Start with the two ends of that table. If every CTO had come through a VP of Engineering seat, there would be more of those seats around than of the job above them. There are 23 against 61.

Somebody will say the VP seat is a doorway rather than a chair. People pass through it, they do not sit in it, so of course it counts thin. Fair.

Then look at the middle row. The most common title one level down by headcount is not VP at all. 99 people here carry Head of Engineering or Director of Engineering, four times the VP count.

Nothing is missing from this ladder. One rung on it is spelled differently, and the guides are written for somebody else’s org chart.

Every figure here is a floor, because only a quarter of members fill that field in, and it is a claim about this community rather than about Central Europe. The rest of the caveats are at the bottom, where I would rather have them than in your way.

The VP row is softer than it looks, too. Of the 39 VP titles of any kind, 14 name a trading desk or a banking function, which is a corporate grade rather than a job running engineers. That leaves the 23 in the table, plus 2 that are neither. I took that apart in Director of Engineering vs Head of Engineering.

Six of the 61 CTO titles carry a second job

Now look at how the CTO titles are written, because people choose their own words in that field.

50 of the 61 are bare, meaning the string says CTO or Chief Technology Officer and nothing else. That is 82%. In the layer below, the same plain form covers 53%. Nobody writes CTO of Payments, because there is no second CTO to be told apart from.

Six of the remaining 11 put a second job in the string. Co-founder, CTO. Founder, CTO. CEO and CTO. One stacks three roles onto one line.

So one CTO title in ten here belongs to somebody who also founded the company or runs it. For those six there was no last rung to climb. The title arrived with the incorporation papers. It is a floor, because anybody who founded the company and writes only CTO is invisible to this method.

Three routes, two of which I can count

The taxonomy is not mine. Google’s own AI Overview names two of these three further down the same page, and Gregor Ojstersek’s 12 ways to become a CTO names all of them among its twelve. What our records add is the weighting, and one honest gap.

You found the company. Counted: 6 of 61. Five of those six titles say Co-founder or Founder and one says CEO, which is the tell. On this route the technology decisions share a desk with the survival of the company, and the second job is the one that fills the week.

The preparation is cash rather than architecture. Open the cash flow sheet before you say yes. If you cannot say the runway in months without looking it up twice, you are not ready to hold both jobs at once.

You get promoted from the job below. Counted: 99 people are standing in it. This is the route Google describes, and the correction our records make to it is one word long. Stop waiting to be made VP. That title turns up once for every four Head and Director titles here, so a Head of Engineering waiting for it is waiting for a word rather than a job.

You are already standing on the rung, which makes the conversation with your own CTO one sentence: if you left in three months, what would I have to be doing already for the board to hand me the function? A good answer names two things you do not own yet. A bad answer is a compliment.

You are next door when the seat empties. Not counted, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Our records hold titles, not transitions, so this branch rests on one public account rather than on a number. Gregor’s is the cleanest I have found: “I was hired as a VP of Engineering in order to improve the engineering processes in the company… After less than 6 months, the CTO left the company and I was offered the CTO role, which I accepted.”

What that establishes is that the timing is not yours. You can do everything right for six years and the seat stays occupied. The preparation is being somebody the board has already heard think out loud, so the test is whose name is on the last three things engineering took into a board meeting. If it is always your CTO’s, you are invisible on the day it counts.

Whichever of the three you are on, the part the guides skip is the one Stephan Platzer put bluntly on amazingcto.com: “No one will respect you for your tech skills; everyone assumes that you’re good at tech, otherwise why are you CTO?”

What our records cannot tell you

Here is the limit, stated plainly, because the pages ranking above this one do not state theirs.

A count of who holds which title today cannot show how anybody got there. It is a photograph, not a film.

I went looking for the film anyway. The title field is a single text value with no history, no previous title field and no record of when it last changed, and I checked the schema on 12 August 2026 rather than assuming. The speaker records were the last hope, because 6 people have submitted a talk more than once and left a role snapshot each time. None of those 6 pairs a VP level role with a CTO one.

So I cannot show you a single verified transition. I can show you the population it produced. I am not going to write the journey from inference and call it research.

The counter case deserves a hearing. Matt Watson’s CTO Career Path: Before and After ranks fourth for this search and is the most honest editorial piece on the page, built on his own path and a poll he ran. His argument is that the path is real and repeatable if you treat CTO as a waypoint rather than a destination. He is right about his market. One career plus one poll is a different kind of evidence from a regional title distribution, and neither of us should pretend otherwise.

My own version is the reason I am not selling a five step plan. I was VP of Engineering at Mews and built the org through Series C, which is the seat this whole search treats as the last rung before the top one. I did not become a CTO. In 2023 I walked away from a role paying $350k to run this community full time, and carried about $75k of debt until 2025 doing it.

What I would tell somebody standing at that fork is the thing I did not know at the time. The seat is not the prize. Ask what you want to be accountable for at 55, then work out which title puts you there, because the ladder will happily carry you past it.

Three checks before Friday

Look up the last three people your company promoted into the seat above you, and write down what each of them held the day before. That is the study our records cannot do, run on the only sample that decides your case. If the answer is Head of Engineering three times, stop waiting to be made VP. If nobody can tell you, you have found out something more urgent than your own title.

If you are on the succession route, find out whether the people who pick know your name. Ask your CTO directly who they would hand the function to for three months. The answer, including the pause before it, is the whole test.

If somebody offers you a CTO title at a small company, ask two questions before you read it as a promotion. How many engineers, and who signs off the budget. A title sharing a line with Co-founder is describing a company rather than a rank.

If what you want is the scope question underneath all three, what a VP of Engineering owns and where the boundary with CTO sits, I keep a longer answer at VP of Engineering: what the role owns and how it differs from CTO, and if you would rather work a specific move one to one than read about the boundary, CTO mentoring is the paid version of that.

The study nobody has run

Of those 61 CTOs, how many were Heads or Directors of Engineering the day before? The records cannot say. The people can.

12 meetups a year across Prague, Brno, Bratislava and Kraków put 120+ of these leaders in a room. Ask three of them which rung they were standing on the day the offer came, and you will have run more of this study in one evening than the whole first page of Google has managed. Membership is free, and if you crossed that line yourself, come and tell me which rung it was from.

How I counted

The base. The strict count reads the structured job title field on our own member records, with no fallback to the profile headline. 840 of the 3,194 records carried one on 12 August 2026. The published community figure is 3,184 members in August 2026, which is the nightly count, and the gap is a day of joins.

Why not the looser ruler. Our published breakdown allows the LinkedIn headline as a fallback and gives bigger numbers in the same order, 88 CTOs and 173 Directors and Heads of any domain, but that field mixes whole bios into the title list, so this post uses the structured field only. The reconciliation is in the previous post, and the 173 first appeared in What Is Engineering Leadership?.

The CTO bucket. Matched on cto, chief technology officer and chief technical officer, so it counts a string pattern rather than everyone doing the job. A sole Head of Technology at a five person startup is doing the CTO job and is not in the 61, which cuts against my own ratio.

The founder overlap. Coded by hand, by me, from the title strings themselves, with no second coder. A title counts only when the person wrote a founder, co-founder or CEO role into the same string.

The history check. The people object in our CRM carries 37 attributes and none is a previous title or a change timestamp. The speaker lists carry a free text company and role field captured per talk submission, dated by when somebody submitted a talk rather than when their role changed. 6 speakers have two or more snapshots. None pairs a VP level string with a CTO one.

The Google quotes. The AI Overview passage at the top, and the same Overview’s later list, which names Found a Company and Join Startups as routes under a heading called Climb the Ladder, were read from a desktop search for “how to become a cto” run from Prague on 12 August 2026. An AI Overview is generated per search, so yours will differ, which is why the opening one is quoted verbatim rather than paraphrased.

Self reported. These are titles members wrote about themselves. A share are aspirational, a share are stale, and one in the CTO bucket is written in Czech and English at once.