30-60-90 day plans, vision presentations, executive and board panels, bar-raiser rounds and reference checks.
6 questions in Executive & Engineering Leadership.
Executive reference checks are conversations, not HR confirmations: a search consultant or executive calls the people you name, and often others. Choose references who can verify the claims you made in the loop, brief them without scripting, and raise difficult chapters first so a back-channel call confirms your account.
A strong 30-60-90 day plan for a VP of Engineering spends the first month diagnosing why dates slip, the second fixing how commitments are made and landing one re-baselined milestone, and the third installing a planning system. Each phase ends in outcomes the CEO can check, not a list of meetings.
A board panel judges whether you can be trusted with the company's money, risk and reputation, not whether you can engineer. At this stage of a CTO interview, expect questions on the business model, technology risk in commercial terms, bad news and the CEO relationship. Answer with consequences first.
In a director-level bar raiser, the stories that work turn on a decision that changed how several teams were funded, staffed or organised, and they hold up five levels of 'why' deep. Team-level leadership stories fail because repeated probing bottoms out in execution, with no choice in it that only you could have made.
Treat the executive title as a label and audit the scope behind it: reporting line, budget authority, headcount, decision rights and a seat in the leadership forum, read against how that kind of company levels. Negotiate a written charter and reporting line first, then a dated title review, then pay inside the band.
Build a vision presentation that argues from their starting point to a specific two-year destination: the answer on one slide, a diagnosis with sources marked, three choices with their costs, what you will not do, a phased sequence and measures. Then prepare the questions as hard as the slides.