In the technology world of established organizations1, careers often follow a predictable arc: Associate Engineer → Software Engineer → Senior Engineer → Team Lead → Manager. Each step rewards technical depth, efficiency, and visible impact. But the Manager role is not just another rung on the ladder—it’s a crucial juncture where career paths diverge.
At this stage, top performers usually face two choices:
The Creator Path – continuing as Principal Engineer → Chief Architect → Distinguished Engineer, driving innovation by building systems, frameworks, and technical breakthroughs.
The Enabler Path – moving into Engineering Manager → Director → VP of Engineering → CXO (CTO2, CIO, or even CEO), where the focus shifts from creating technology to enabling its adoption, scaling, and business impact.
Both paths are valuable. But they demand different toolkits — and both, in their own way, define what it means to grow as a leader of technology.
The Enabler’s Mandate
Tech creators focus on building—designing the architecture, crafting the system, ensuring its technical excellence. Tech enablers, on the other hand, focus on amplifying—ensuring innovations move beyond proof-of-concept brilliance into organizational and customer success.
Enablers:
Build alignment between creators and business goals.
Advocate for adoption within teams and across the company.
Enable scaling by mapping solutions to customer needs.
In many ways, they form the bridge between creators and executive leadership. Without enablers, even the best innovations risk staying underutilized.
What Real Companies Practice
This split between “creator” and “enabler” isn’t theoretical—many global tech companies explicitly design dual career ladders to reflect it.
We can also see this reflected in individual careers:
Satya Nadella exemplifies the enabler track. His rise from engineer to CEO at Microsoft was marked not by becoming the company’s top technical architect, but by championing cloud adoption and organizational transformation—scaling innovation rather than coding it himself.
Jeff Dean, in contrast, embodies the creator path. As Chief Scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, he continues to shape the future of distributed systems and artificial intelligence. His influence comes not from managing organizations, but from advancing the boundaries of computer science itself.
Across these companies and leaders, the lesson is clear: innovation requires both the brilliance of creators and the leverage of enablers.
The Middle Management Confusion
This juncture—especially in middle management—is where confusion often arises. When a brilliant technologist moves into a managerial role, the ecosystem around them may continue to expect groundbreaking technical contributions. But their success now depends on enabling others, not just innovating themselves.
This shift can cause friction:
For the individual: wrestling with the shift from being “the one who does” to being “the one who enables others to do”.
For the organization: undervaluing the enabler role because it’s less visible than pure technical innovation (initially).
Clarity is critical. Both creators and enablers are essential, but their contributions look different.
The Changing Ratio: Tech Skills vs. Soft Skills
For aspiring enablers, the equation of required skills evolve. Early on, success is defined almost entirely by technical excellence. But as one moves toward leadership, the ratio changes:
Soft skills—influence, communication, stakeholder management—become as important as technical depth.
Exposure—to adjacent product stacks, cross-functional domains, and external customer needs—reshapes perspective.
The leader’s role is no longer just about what we can build, but how enabling others / team will result in products that are adopted, scaled, and sustained.
Toolkit Differences: Creator vs. Enabler
Closing Thought
As organizations grow, both creators and enablers are vital. The former bring breakthroughs; the latter ensure those breakthroughs see the light of day at scale. Recognizing, valuing, and clarifying these roles—especially in middle management—can unlock enormous potential for both individuals and organizations.
The real question for every technologist reaching this career juncture is:
Do you want to be remembered for what you built, or for what you enabled others to achieve?
Related Reading
In an earlier article, From Borrowed Identity to Authentic Contribution, I explored how originality forms the foundation of leadership style. Together with this piece on the Creator vs. Enabler paths, it builds a broader perspective on what it means to grow as a leader of technology.
Titles in Startups vs. Enterprises
This distinction between Creator and Enabler plays out differently depending on context.
In startups, titles matter far less than execution. A “CTO” may still be writing production code, debugging at midnight, or doubling as a product manager. Roles flex to match immediate business needs, and ownership is the true differentiator.
In established enterprises, titles carry a tighter mapping. The separation between a Chief Architect and a CTO, or between a Distinguished Engineer and a VP, is clearer and backed by structured career ladders.
This explains why career paths often feel fluid and overlapping in early-stage companies, but codified and specialized in mature organizations.
CTO vs. Chief Architect
It’s worth clarifying a common misconception: many assume the Creator Path naturally leads to CTO. In reality, CTO is usually an Enabler role. A CTO’s mandate is to align technology with business goals, scale teams, manage stakeholders, and ensure adoption.
The Creator Path more often culminates in roles like Chief Architect, Distinguished Engineer, or Technical Fellow, where the emphasis stays on technical depth and innovation. Meanwhile, the Enabler Path opens doors to CTO, CIO, or CEO roles, where organizational and business impact take center stage.
The information provided is insightful, and the toolkit is very helpful.
I’d like to add a point to the discussion on ‘Titles in Startups vs. Enterprises.’ The distinction isn’t always clear-cut, especially in situations, where a startup has merged with an enterprise. To illustrate, I often paraphrase my leaders’s perspective: “Steve Jobs was successful because he had Tim Cook to handle execution. If there’s no Tim Cook, managers need to be both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook to succeed.”
Loved the clear comparison between tech and managerial paths