alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

40 Episodes
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By: Tobias Schlottke - alphalist CTO Podcast

This podcast features interviews of CTOs and other technical leadership figures and topics range from technology (AI, blockchain, cyber, DevOps, Web Architecture, etc.) to management (e.g. scaling, structuring teams, mentoring, technical recruiting, product etc.). Guests from leading tech companies share their best practices and knowledge. The goal is to support other CTOs on their journey through tech and engineering, inspire and allow a sneak-peek into other successful companies to understand how they think and act. Get awesome insights into the world‘s top tech companies, personalities with this podcast brought to you by Tobias Schlottke.

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#144 Writing Code Is No Longer the Job: Dana Lawson on Trusting AI Agents Like Self-Driving Cars // CTO @ Netlify
#144 Writing Code Is No Longer the Job: Dana Lawson on Trusting AI Agents Like Self-Driving Cars // CTO @ Netlify episode artwork
#144
Today at 1:00 AM

Why CTOs should stop asking whether they trust AI agents and start asking when that trust becomes automatic, and where human judgment still has to hold the line.

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Dana Lawson, CTO at Netlify, joins Tobi for a candid conversation about the changing role of software engineers in the age of AI agents.

Dana's path into technology began in the US...


#143 The Company Brain: How Kombo Runs on a Git Repo and a Cursor Agent — with Aike Hillbrands, Co-Founder & CTO @ Kombo
#143 The Company Brain: How Kombo Runs on a Git Repo and a Cursor Agent — with Aike Hillbrands, Co-Founder & CTO @ Kombo episode artwork
#143
07/30/2026

A GitHub repo, a Cursor cloud agent, and a public Slack channel replaced Notion AI at a $25M-funded HR integration startup, and became the whole company's shared brain.

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Two failed startups, a Y Combinator batch, and a $25M Series A later, Aike Hillbrands and his co-founders built Kombo into a $10M+ ARR HR integration platform, and then, almost...


#142 Why LLMs Need Their Own Programming Language: From Assembly to AI with Vaibhav Gupta // Co-founder @ BAML
#142 Why LLMs Need Their Own Programming Language: From Assembly to AI with Vaibhav Gupta // Co-founder @ BAML episode artwork
#142
07/16/2026

From HoloLens assembly to AI: Vaibhav Gupta on why LLMs need their own language, and how BAML makes them type-safe and shippable at agent speed.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Blocks

A decade building computer vision and writing assembly at Microsoft (HoloLens), Google, and D.E. Shaw, then a from-scratch bet on a programming language built for LLMs. Vaibhav Gupta joins Tobi to explain why probabilistic compute needs its own tooling, what "shipping at agent speed" actually requires, and why the world's appetite for software is mathematically infinite.

Chapters: 00:00:00 — Intro 00:01:00 — From HoloLens to D.E. Shaw: a de...


#141 AI Pat Works Here Now: Why Agents Must Follow Human Rules with Pat Casey // CTO @ ServiceNow
#141 AI Pat Works Here Now: Why Agents Must Follow Human Rules with Pat Casey // CTO @ ServiceNow episode artwork
#141
07/02/2026

ServiceNow's CTO of 20 years explains why the safest way to deploy AI agents is to treat them like employees, same rules, same approvers, same spending limits, and why AI is reshuffling the deck on who your best engineers are.

Intro How do you go from installing software off floppy disks to running engineering for a $13B revenue company — without ever losing the fish? Pat Casey, CTO of ServiceNow and its first engineer after founder Fred Luddy, joins Tobi to talk 20 years of scale, the architecture behind 90,000 databases, and why enterprise AI agents should be treated exactly like slightly untrustworthy em...


#140 From Stripe's Fifth Engineer to Serving Millions of Developers with Anurag Goel // Founder & CEO @ Render Goel
#140 From Stripe's Fifth Engineer to Serving Millions of Developers with Anurag Goel // Founder & CEO @ Render Goel episode artwork
#140
06/18/2026

Anurag Goel was Stripe's fifth engineer before he built Render into a platform millions of developers deploy on. Here's his contrarian read on agents, security, and why "the AI cloud" is the wrong thing to be.

Show Notes

Anurag Goel joined Stripe as its fifth engineer in 2011 and later ran risk. He left to solve a big problem and landed on the one he'd watched eat Stripe's engineering time: making infrastructure disappear. This conversation is about what Render learned on the way to millions of developers and what changes now that a lot of what gets deployed...


#139 Your Future Job Is a Decision Inbox — Max Deichmann Built the Layer That Gets You There // Co-Founder @ Langfuse
#139 Your Future Job Is a Decision Inbox — Max Deichmann Built the Layer That Gets You There // Co-Founder @ Langfuse episode artwork
#139
06/04/2026

Max Deichmann built Langfuse — the open-source LLM engineering platform acquired by ClickHouse — and explains why the engineer of the future isn't writing code, they're reviewing what agents did overnight.

Max Deichmann didn't set out to build the observability layer for the AI era. He started with mobile apps, taught himself to code via Harvard's CS50, and ended up in Y Combinator with a SaaS product he wasn't excited about. Then ChatGPT launched, and on a Sunday night at 10 pm, his co-founder asked: "If you just had time, what would you build?" The answer became Langfuse and eventually led to an a...


#138 From Hacker News to W3C: How One Amazon Engineer Accidentally Shaped the Future of AI Browsers // Alex Nahas, MCP-B
#138 From Hacker News to W3C: How One Amazon Engineer Accidentally Shaped the Future of AI Browsers // Alex Nahas, MCP-B episode artwork
#138
05/21/2026

How a browser-based fix for an enterprise auth problem became a W3C web standard and what it means for how AI agents will interact with the web.

Alex Nahas, founder of MCP-B and initiator of the WebMCP web standard, joins Tobias to explore one of the most underappreciated shifts happening in AI: the browser as the primary runtime for agentic systems.

Key topics covered:

What MCP actually is: an RPC framework for calling tools across processes, not the complex protocol it's made out to be The OAuth problem: why MCP's push towards OAuth locked out...


#137 - Only Three Search Engines Left Standing: One of Them Powers Your AI with JP Schmetz // Chief of Ads @ Brave
#137 - Only Three Search Engines Left Standing: One of Them Powers Your AI with JP Schmetz // Chief of Ads @ Brave episode artwork
#137
05/07/2026

Thirty years building search infrastructure — and why the AI industry quietly depends on it.

SHOW NOTES

Jean-Paul Schmetz has been close to search infrastructure for nearly three decades — as founder of Clix, the European search engine that eventually became part of Brave, and now as Chief of Ads at Brave Software. In this conversation with Tobi, he opens up the hood on one of the internet's most misunderstood infrastructure layers.

Key topics covered:

The three independent search indices: why only Google, Bing, and Brave could answer every query on earth if the others disappeared How...


#136 - AI Writes Code: Who Architects the Consequences? with Neal Ford // Software Architect & Author
#136 - AI Writes Code: Who Architects the Consequences? with Neal Ford // Software Architect & Author episode artwork
#136
04/23/2026

Fitness functions, agentic guardrails, and why experienced architects matter more than ever in the AI era

Show Notes: Neal Ford has spent decades thinking about how software systems hold together over time. In this episode, Tobias sits down with Neal to ask the question nobody is asking loudly enough: when AI agents write the code, who is responsible for the architecture?

We dive into:

-** Neal's origin story: **from journalism to mechanical engineering to computer science, and why writing made him a better architect

**AI as an "advanced beginner": **why LLMs pattern-match instead of...


#135 - From Legacy to Innovation: Yahoo's Modernization & AI with Lee Zen // CTO @ Yahoo
#135 - From Legacy to Innovation: Yahoo's Modernization & AI with Lee Zen // CTO @ Yahoo episode artwork
#135
01/29/2026

Modernizing Yahoo in the private-equity era: legacy constraints, shipping velocity, and AI-native consumer products

Yahoo is far more than a nostalgia brand—it’s a broad consumer platform operating at huge scale. In this episode, Tobias sits down with Lee Zen (CTO @ Yahoo) to explore how the company is modernizing in the private-equity era, and what “innovation” looks like when you’re also responsible for decades of legacy systems.

We dive into:

**

Yahoo’s consumer portfolio: Mail, Finance, Sports, News, Search—and what that implies for platform strategy What changes under private equity: priorities, focus, and mod...


#134 - From Inner to Outer Loop: Agentic Coding, Stacking PRs, and the Cursor Merger with Greg Foster // CTO @ Graphite
#134 - From Inner to Outer Loop: Agentic Coding, Stacking PRs, and the Cursor Merger with Greg Foster // CTO @ Graphite episode artwork
#134
01/15/2026

Solving the "Outer Loop" bottleneck: Agentic coding, Stacked PRs, and the future of the CTO role with Graphite's Greg Foster

The "Inner Loop" of coding (typing syntax) has been solved by AI. The new bottleneck is the "Outer Loop"—reviewing, testing, and merging the flood of code that agents generate.

In this episode, Greg Foster (CTO of Graphite, now part of Cursor) explains why this shift drove their merger and what it means for the future of engineering.

We dive into:

The Outer Loop Crisis: Why fast code generation breaks traditional review processes (and ho...


#133 - Build the Learning Machine: AI Adoption, Flow Metrics, and the Future of the CTO Role with Eric Bowman
#133 - Build the Learning Machine: AI Adoption, Flow Metrics, and the Future of the CTO Role with Eric Bowman episode artwork
#133
12/15/2025

From “dangerously skip permissions” to the Andon cord: voluntary adoption, flow metrics, and how agents change what CTOs optimize for

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In this episode, Eric Bowman (CTO @ King.com) breaks down how AI is changing programming, creativity, and technical leadership. We talk about what “livi...


#132 - Clarity Over Tooling: Velocity & Building Teams Without Drama with Loïc Houssier // CTO @ Superhuman Mail
#132 - Clarity Over Tooling: Velocity & Building Teams Without Drama with Loïc Houssier // CTO @ Superhuman Mail episode artwork
#132
11/27/2025

From acquisition carve-outs to 100ms interaction rules: Engineering velocity through team clarity, not tool proliferation

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Outline How do you maintain execution velocity while building quality products? Loïc Houssier (CTO of Superhuman Mail, formerly Superhuman) offers a contrarian perspective: the answer isn't better tools or frameworks—it's radical clarity about team missions and strategic alignment.

With experience spanning French defense contractors (Orange, Thales), navig...


#131 - AI Product Strategy: When to Build and When to Wait with Matthias Keller // CPO @ Kayak
#131 - AI Product Strategy: When to Build and When to Wait with Matthias Keller // CPO @ Kayak episode artwork
#131
11/13/2025

From Alexa to LLMs: Platform experiments, distribution challenges, and how AI is democratizing feature development in travel tech

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In this episode, Matthias Keller (CPO @ Kayak) shares strategic lessons about making AI product decisions under uncertainty. With 12 years at Kayak and experience spanning multiple AI waves—from Alexa to LLMs—Matthias offers a masterclass in knowing when to invest early and when to wait.

We dive into:

Strategic framework for evaluating emerging AI platforms (Alexa, ChatGP...


#130 - From PhD Research to DuckDB: Building the Next Generation of Analytical DBs with Mark Raasveldt // CTO @ DuckDB
#130 - From PhD Research to DuckDB: Building the Next Generation of Analytical DBs with Mark Raasveldt // CTO @ DuckDB episode artwork
#130
10/16/2025

How single-node performance and embedded analytics are revolutionizing database architecture for modern applications

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In this episode, we dive deep into the world of analytical databases with Mark Raasveldt, the co-founder and CTO of DuckDB Labs. Mark takes us through his fascinating journey from academic research to building one of the most talked-about databases in the industry.

We explore:

How DuckDB emerged from academic research at CWI Amsterdam The technical philosophy behind embedded analytical databases Wh...


#129 - $32B Lessons: Building CTO Teams, Rapid Innovation, and Staying Customer-Connected with Solal Raveh
#129 - $32B Lessons: Building CTO Teams, Rapid Innovation, and Staying Customer-Connected with Solal Raveh episode artwork
#129
09/18/2025

What Wiz's $32B acquisition teaches about scaling CTO teams, rapid innovation, and customer-centric leadership

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What does it take to build a company worth Google's $32 billion acquisition? Solal shares the hard-won lessons from scaling technical teams during one of the fastest-growing security companies in history.

Key leadership insights from the episode:

• CTO Office Evolution: How Wiz split technical leadership into 3-4 specialized tracks focused on domain expertise rather than geography • The Geographic Cloning Failure: Why hi...


#128 - From Tickets to Problems: Klaus Breyer // Head of Product & Technology @ Edding
#128 - From Tickets to Problems: Klaus Breyer // Head of Product & Technology @ Edding episode artwork
#128
09/04/2025

From assembly lines to problem-solving teams: practical strategies for breaking development silos

Here's the thing about agile transformations: they almost never work the way they're supposed to. Teams end up more siloed than before, chasing tickets instead of solving actual problems. Klaus Breyer has seen this pattern everywhere, and he's figured out some ways to break it.

Klaus runs product and technology at Edding—yeah, the pen company—but his background is anything but traditional. He learned team coordination by managing 40-person World of Warcraft raids, ran a few startups, and now applies those lessons to building soft...


#127 - Kelsey Hightower's Unfiltered Truths: 25 Years of Infrastructure, DevOps, and Retiring at 42
#127 - Kelsey Hightower's Unfiltered Truths: 25 Years of Infrastructure, DevOps, and Retiring at 42 episode artwork
#127
08/07/2025

Unfiltered lessons on infrastructure, career strategy, and the art of knowing when to stop.

What does 25 years in tech teach you? Kelsey Hightower, a self-taught engineer who rose to become a Distinguished Engineer at Google and a key figure in the Kubernetes community, sits down with Tobi to share unfiltered insights from his extensive career and his recent decision to retire at 42.

This conversation goes beyond the hype, focusing on the timeless principles of technical leadership, system maintenance, and career strategy. Kelsey breaks down the reality of infrastructure management, the hidden costs of complexity, and why the...


#126 - AI Transformation at Scale: Practical Adoption Across 150+ Engineers with Peter Gostev // Head of AI @ Moonpig
#126 - AI Transformation at Scale: Practical Adoption Across 150+ Engineers with Peter Gostev // Head of AI @ Moonpig episode artwork
#126
07/24/2025

Navigating AI hype versus implementation reality in large engineering organizations

The AI transformation challenge isn't just technical—it's organizational. Peter Gostev, Head of AI at Moonpig, discusses building practical AI capabilities in a 600-person company while navigating the gap between AI hype and implementation reality.

From managing adoption across 150 software engineers to partnering with non-technical teams, Peter shares insights on driving meaningful AI transformation that goes beyond superficial tool usage. This conversation explores the contrast between industry claims of widespread AI adoption and the nuanced reality of implementing AI at scale.

TIMESTAMPS: [00:00:51] Introduction: Peter Gostev, He...


#125 - Two CTO Dinosaurs vs. Today's Tech Hype with Raz Shuty // CTO @ auxmoney
#125 - Two CTO Dinosaurs vs. Today's Tech Hype with Raz Shuty // CTO @ auxmoney episode artwork
#125
07/10/2025

Unfiltered insights on microservices myths, cloud cost reality, and pragmatic technical leadership

Two veteran CTOs tear down today's tech hype with brutal honesty and hard-won experience. Raz Schweiger-Shuty shares his controversial approach to technical leadership at auxmoney, where he stopped a microservices rewrite and focused on business outcomes over engineering trends.

From his early days as a QA engineer to running 80-person engineering organizations, Raz demonstrates why sometimes the best technical decision is the boring one that actually works. This conversation offers a masterclass in pragmatic technical leadership for an age obsessed with the latest frameworks and...


#124 - The Path to AGI: Inside poolside’s AI Model Factory for Code with Eiso Kant
#124 - The Path to AGI: Inside poolside’s AI Model Factory for Code with Eiso Kant episode artwork
#124
06/27/2025

Building Human-Level AI for Code: Model Factories, RL at Scale, and Distributed Teams

Technical Deep Dives:

Poolside’s model factory: end-to-end automation from raw data to production models Scaling RL from code execution: 800,000+ containerized repos, millions of agent tasks Immutable versioning with Apache Iceberg for full traceability Distributed team structure: 120+ engineers across US/EU, monthly in-person sprints Hardware orchestration: 10,000+ H200s, hot swap failover, dynamic allocation Leadership: dividing responsibilities, low-ego culture, and the MIT principle Future of software: managing agent workforces, context window strategies, continual learning

"Our model factory runs thousands of experiments before a single production mo...


#123 - From Nokia to AI-IoT: Engineering the Physical World with Bernd Groß // CEO @ Cumulocity
#123 - From Nokia to AI-IoT: Engineering the Physical World with Bernd Groß // CEO @ Cumulocity episode artwork
#123
06/12/2025

Bridging operational technology and cloud architecture for industrial-scale systems

The convergence of AI and IoT is reshaping how technical leaders approach industrial systems architecture. Bernd Groß, CEO and co-founder of Cumulocity, shares insights from building Germany's leading IoT platform—from its origins as a Nokia spin-off to becoming a critical infrastructure for companies managing tens of thousands of connected industrial assets.

This conversation explores the unique engineering challenges of industrial IoT, where systems must process 50 terabytes of monthly data from wind turbines while maintaining real-time control capabilities. Bernd discusses the evolution from monolithic architectures to microservices, the com...


#122 - Grid Control in Milliseconds: Engineering Energy Systems with Barbara Wittenberg // CTO @ 1KOMMA5°
#122 - Grid Control in Milliseconds: Engineering Energy Systems with Barbara Wittenberg // CTO @ 1KOMMA5° episode artwork
#122
05/16/2025

Real-time system architecture lessons from the edge of the energy transition

Technical infrastructure enables the modern energy transition. Barbara Wittenberg, CTO at 1KOMMA5°, reveals the engineering challenges behind connecting and optimizing 40,000+ household energy assets while building a unified tech platform after acquiring 80+ companies across 7 countries.

Tech leaders will find valuable parallels to their own challenges as Barbara discusses how her team modernized legacy systems, managed complex integrations, and deployed advanced optimization algorithms that must respond in milliseconds to prevent grid failures.

Key technical insights include:

🏗️ Building infrastructure-as-code and standardizing operations across acquired companies 📊 Creating data pipe...


#121 - Canva's Playbook: Scaling Teams, Tech, and AI with Adam Schuck // Senior Engineering Director @ Canva
#121 - Canva's Playbook: Scaling Teams, Tech, and AI with Adam Schuck // Senior Engineering Director @ Canva episode artwork
#121
05/01/2025

Insights into hypergrowth, late-stage career frameworks, AI adoption, and the tech powering Canva's collaborative editor.

In this episode, Tobi chats with Adam Schuck, Senior Engineering Director at Canva, a company that has scaled to over 5,000 employees, 2,000+ engineers, and 230 million MAUs while remaining profitable. Adam shares his journey through startups (including acquisitions by Twitter and Canva) and large tech companies like Google, leading to his current role managing 220 engineers at Canva.

They dive deep into the challenges and strategies behind Canva's hypergrowth, including:

Scaling engineering teams from 150 to over 2000. Implementing a career framework (Growth & Development Framework) relatively...


#120 - AI's Singularity & Commoditization: Navigating Hype vs. Reality with Georg Zoeller // Co-Founder @ C4AIL
#120 - AI's Singularity & Commoditization: Navigating Hype vs. Reality with Georg Zoeller // Co-Founder @ C4AIL episode artwork
#120
04/17/2025

Debunking AI hype, exploring security risks, and strategies for CTOs in the age of rapid change.

In this episode, Tobi talks with Georg Zoeller, Co-Founder of the Centre for AI Leadership and mercenaries.ai, about the turbulent landscape of AI. Georg, with his background at Meta and deep expertise in AI strategy, cuts through the hype surrounding AI's capabilities and economic impact.

They discuss the 'singularity' we're already in, driven by rapid, open-source AI development, and why this makes future predictions impossible. Georg argues that software engineering is being commoditized due to the vast amount of training...


#119 - Navigating Ambiguity and AI's Impact on Engineering feat. Ivan Kusalic // CTO @ Enpal
#119 - Navigating Ambiguity and AI's Impact on Engineering feat. Ivan Kusalic // CTO @ Enpal episode artwork
#119
04/04/2025

Leading in ambiguous environments and the impact of AI on engineering practices

In this episode, Tobi talks with Ivan Kusalic, CTO of Enpal, who leads a team of 250 engineers at one of Germany's leading solar energy companies. Ivan shares insights from his extensive technical leadership journey and his recent return to coding after seven years due to his excitement about AI.

Ivan discusses how he navigates complexity and ambiguity in the renewable energy sector, where Enpal builds systems to help households manage solar panels, batteries, EV chargers, and heat pumps as integrated energy solutions. He explains the...


#118 - Radical Engineering Culture and High Bar Hiring feat. Stefan Richter // Founder & CTO @ freiheit.com technologies
#118 - Radical Engineering Culture and High Bar Hiring feat. Stefan Richter // Founder & CTO @ freiheit.com technologies episode artwork
#118
03/20/2025

Ship Great Software Through Simplicity and Discipline

Discover insights into building a high-performance engineering organization with Stefan Richter, founder of freiheit.com technologies. With 25+ years of experience delivering successful software projects for the Who’s Who of European businesses and industries, Stefan shares his philosophy of radical engineering culture and maintaining an exceptionally high bar in recruiting. This episode dives deep into how freiheit.com has achieved their "Never Late, Never Failed" mission through disciplined processes, carefully selected talent, and a relentless focus on simplicity.

Listen to find out:

🎯 Why shipping great software is their mission 🧑‍💻 How they main...


#117 - Navigating AI Trends with Dat Tran // Partner & CTO @ DATANOMIQ, VP AI/ML @ Beams Safety AI
#117 - Navigating AI Trends with Dat Tran // Partner & CTO @ DATANOMIQ, VP AI/ML @ Beams Safety AI episode artwork
#117
02/07/2025

Tobi and Dat discuss AI's impact on technical leadership, tools, deep learning, and Europe's innovation scene, including practical use cases for AI agents.

AI is moving faster than ever, and staying ahead of the curve is a challenge for every tech leader. In this episode, Dat Tran joins Tobi to break down what’s happening in the AI space, from cutting-edge model releases to AI-powered productivity tools and the global race for AI dominance. Dat has spent years leading AI teams at Idealo and Axel Springer, co-founding AI-driven startups, and now helps companies make sense of AI without the fl...


#116 - Exploring Platform Engineering feat. Camille Fournier // CTO @ Open Athena & Author @ O'Reilly Media
#116 - Exploring Platform Engineering feat. Camille Fournier // CTO @ Open Athena & Author @ O'Reilly Media episode artwork
#116
01/22/2025

Platform Teams and DevOps Optimization: Insights from Camille Fournier on platform engineering, career growth, and CTO strategies for success.

How do you create an effective platform team and optimize DevOps? Tobi interviews Camille Fournier about her career, technical insights, and best practices in platform engineering. Camille shares her journey from building her own computers and installing Linux in high school to becoming Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase and authoring influential books for engineers 📚.

👩‍💻 Camille's early fascination with computers and engineering, including building her own systems and installing Linux 📚 Authoring 'The Manager's Path' and 'Platform Engineering' 🌐 Understanding platform engineering and i...


115 - Exploring Growth and Compliance feat. Dennis Winter // CTO @ Börse Stuttgart
115 - Exploring Growth and Compliance feat. Dennis Winter // CTO @ Börse Stuttgart episode artwork
#115
01/09/2025

Scaling Tech in Regulated Industries: Engineering Growth with Security, Compliance, and Culture

Ever wondered how regulated companies like stock exchanges handle tech growth? Dennis Winter (CTO @ Börse Stuttgart) shares how to build engineering organizations in regulated environments. With experience from embedded systems to leading tech at SolarisBank and Börse Stuttgart, he dives deep into scaling teams while maintaining security and compliance standards 🏦

🏗️ Early-stage tech decisions and building engineering culture 🔄 Evolving team structures and processes as you scale beyond 50 employees 🔐 Security and compliance in regulated environments 🛠️ Infrastructure automation and the importance of early monitoring 🤝 Building team ownership and accountability in re...


#114 - Building an SDK feat. Dr. Daniel Hauschildt // CPTO @ IMG.LY
#114 - Building an SDK feat. Dr. Daniel Hauschildt // CPTO @ IMG.LY episode artwork
#114
12/19/2024

The Tech and Business Side of Building an SDK

Get insight into the SDK business (and learn about cross-platform performance and developer marketing) with Dr. Daniel Hauschildt (MD & CPTO at IMG.LY). As a client-side offering (no servers!), IMG.LY needs to take extra steps to ensure reliability on all devices 📱, platforms 💻 and browsers 🌐. From crafting developer-friendly documentation to optimizing performance on every device and platform imaginable, Daniel shares hard-earned insights from the SDK business.

👨‍💻What makes an SDK truly developer-friendly? 🤔 📜Documentation: The secret sauce of INBOUND developer marketing 🔌 API Design: Beauty of purpose-driven entry points 🧩How they build for the future with mod...


#113 - Faster Incident Response feat. Tim Armandpour // CTO @ PagerDuty
#113 - Faster Incident Response feat. Tim Armandpour // CTO @ PagerDuty episode artwork
#113
12/05/2024

Planning AND Practice: The Secret to Incident Response

Plan and PRACTICE for better incident response with insights from Tim Armandpour, CTO of PagerDuty. Learn the secrets to resilience from the team that mitigated the impact of a major outage—handling a 250% traffic surge while delivering on their SLA.

Listen to find out:

🛠️ Why planning AND practice are both critical for incident response. 🚧 How to practice for incident response (e.g Failure Fridays with Chaos Engineering) 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Ownership: Why tech AND business teams must join post-mortems. ☁️ How to mitigate the impact of your cloud provider’s lower SLA. ⚓ Which architectural patterns ar...


#112 - Cross Functional Team Members feat. Daniel Bartholomae // CTO @ optilyz
#112 - Cross Functional Team Members feat. Daniel Bartholomae // CTO @ optilyz episode artwork
#112
11/21/2024

Cross-Functional Team Members: What, Why, How

Find out about cross-functional team members with Daniel Bartholomae, CTO at optilyz (direct mail SaaS). At optilyz, team members wear multiple hats—whatever hats they need to own the product lifecycle. From product management and design to development and customer engagement, this model eliminates silos and drives efficiency. Daniel breaks down how this innovative approach works, the tools and processes that make it possible, and why it’s a perfect fit for small B2B SaaS companies.

Listen to find out:

🚀 How ‘no product managers’ = efficient ‘sprints’ 🛠️ Why optilyz opts for Miro and Asana i...


#111 - Organising for Impact feat. Eric Bowman // CTO @ King
#111 - Organising for Impact feat. Eric Bowman // CTO @ King episode artwork
#111
11/07/2024

Output → Outcome → Impact | Product + Tech | Adjacent Possibilities

How do we actually organize people to consistently deliver value and enjoy the process? This, Eric Bowman (CTO @ King) says, is the core challenge facing any CTO. In this thought-provoking episode, Eric shares insights from his remarkable career in gaming (The Sims, King), e-commerce (Zalando), and navigation technology (TomTom), offering a unique perspective on building high-performing teams and effective tech organizations.

Listen in to explore: 🔄 Outcome AND Outputs → Impact (ala Kent Beck’s Universal Value Streams) 🤖 Theory of Adjacent Possibility + Why AI isn’t there yet ⚖️ Product + Tech: Single-threaded (Amazon) vs. Dual Role (Marty...


#110 - Developer Efficiency feat. Rebecca Murphey // Field CTO @ Swarmia & Co-Author of Build
#110 - Developer Efficiency feat. Rebecca Murphey // Field CTO @ Swarmia & Co-Author of Build episode artwork
#110
10/24/2024

Aligning engineering with business outcomes, developer productivity and developer experience

Become a more effective team in this CTO podcast featuring Rebecca Murphey, Field CTO of Swarmia and co-author of Build. From her years of experience working in the developer productivity organizations at Stripe and Indeed and now at Swarmia, Rebecca knows this conversation isn’t just about developer metrics and productivity - it’s about the broader picture 🖼️. How do we align🧭 our engineering work with business outcomes💸, developer experience 😀AND developer productivity⚡. And just as important, how do we communicate what we’re doing (and not doing) to other stakeholders?


#109 - Cloud Cost Optimisation feat. Claire Fautsch // CTO @ Joblift
#109 - Cloud Cost Optimisation feat. Claire Fautsch  // CTO @ Joblift episode artwork
#109
10/17/2024

From 100k to 30k: How Joblift slashed their monthly cloud bill

Save Money on Cloud Costs with Claire Fautsch (CTO @ Joblift). Find out how the team at Joblift slashed monthly cloud costs from €100K to €30K without compromising performance. Listen to find out: 📊 How to build dashboards 📈 How to align cloud costs with business KPIs 🤝 How to get the entire team involved in cost optimization (Spoiler Alert: No FinOps team) 🛠 How to optimize resource allocation and avoid over-provisioning ⚙️ Technical tweaks that made an impact: CUDs, Spot instances, SSD usage, network costs

Listen here

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#108 - Monitoring as Code feat.Hannes Lenke // CEO & Co-founder @ Checkly
#108 - Monitoring as Code feat.Hannes Lenke // CEO & Co-founder @ Checkly episode artwork
#108
09/30/2024

How DevOps has Changed QA

Keep an eye on the latest trends in this CTO podcast episode featuring Hannes Lenke (CEO and Co-founder of Checkly). Hannes shares insights from over a decade of shaping the testing and monitoring landscape. From AI-powered mobile testing to cloud-based browser testing to synthetic monitoring, he has seen it all. Listen to find out: 👀 What is "Monitoring as Code"? How does it differ from traditional observability? 🔄 Has DevOps changed QA forever? Is there still a place for dedicated QA teams in an automated world? 🚀 How did Checkly evolve into a PLG company with a sales tea...


#107 - Sustainability Over Hypergrowth feat.Tuomas Artman // CTO @ Linear
#107 - Sustainability Over Hypergrowth feat.Tuomas Artman // CTO @ Linear episode artwork
#107
09/13/2024

Grow the business, not the headcount with insights from Tuomas Artman (CTO of Linear). Saying no to hypergrowth helped Linear succeed, but how did they do it? How did they build a high-quality product with a smaller team?

Listen to find out:

How to achieve quality products without increasing headcount 🌱 Avoiding feature bloat: The pitfalls of customer-driven development ⚖️ Why you should build for longevity, not acquisition: The downsides of selling too early 🏛 Why they raised funds after initially planning to bootstrap 💰 Why Full-Stack Engineers are in 👍, and QA Teams are out 👎 Why Linear avoids automated UI tests 🚦 How a local...


#106 - Meritocracy, Backend and Engineer-led Sales feat. Shyam Sankar // CTO @ Palantir Technologies
#106 - Meritocracy, Backend and Engineer-led Sales feat. Shyam Sankar // CTO @ Palantir Technologies episode artwork
#106
08/30/2024

Diversity in Meritocracy Through Rebellion

Discover new ways to do things with Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, who is working to deprecate backend development using their experience with 150 independent dev teams running a collection of 5,000 microservices. Yet this podcast is more than that (although I was blown away by the demo)—expect great nuggets of wisdom on meritocracy, data, and of course, backend. Think of this podcast as a series of back-to-back nuggets of wisdom that not only help you make sense of what you've observed but also open your mind to emerging trends.

Listen to find ou...


#105 - Trust & Accountability in Remote Teams feat. Sabrina Farmer // CTO @ GitLab
#105 - Trust & Accountability in Remote Teams feat. Sabrina Farmer // CTO @ GitLab episode artwork
#105
08/16/2024

AI-driven DevSecOps

Find out how to build trust and accountability in a fully remote team in this CTO podcast featuring Sabrina Farmer, CTO @ GitLab. You will also hear how Sabrina draws on her experience in AI, DevSecOps, and her 19 years at Google to rethink the developer experience. Listen to find out: How Gitlab's CEO Challenge encourages developers to innovate and automate away historic challenges (e.g. Log4js) Why DevOps is just problem-solving 🕵️‍♀️ at all levels of the stack How to use AI to create teaching moments 💡 in the developer workflow How GitLab onboards quicker with detailed documentation📝 (no tribal knowledge...