I liked this fragment describing the role of a Senior Vice President (SVP) in a large organization.
The prospective SVP needs to build a strong, healthy team culture that attracts and retains top engineers and delivers good business results. There are many ways to do that: some managers are charismatic and personable, some thoughtful and analytical, some are good at asking the right questions and listening to the answers. Google especially emphasizes team culture, compared to somewhere like Amazon that emphasizes results, but you can’t make it to SVP without a good dose of both.
SVPs manage divisions with thousands of people. They are responsible for establishing the culture of that division, which at such a large scale winds up being a big part of the culture of the company as a whole. They set strategies that determine what all those people work on day to day. Those strategies include both business and technical components: what should we build and how should we build it?