Brought to you by

• Adeva — Global network of top developers connecting businesses with world-class talent.

In this episode of CTO Insights, I sat down with Bryan Finster, co-creator of Minimum Viable Continuous Delivery, to talk about one of the hardest problems engineering leaders face: improving delivery in legacy systems.

We dig into a pragmatic, step-by-step approach to continuous delivery in legacy and enterprise environments. From getting leadership buy-in to improving test coverage and reshaping teams, Bryan shares how to make real progress without betting everything on a full rewrite. If you’re stuck with slow, manual releases and want a safer, more realistic path to faster delivery, this episode is for you.

What you’ll learn

• Why continuous delivery is a business strategy, not just a technical improvement, and how it improves release speed, quality, and team morale.

• How to introduce continuous delivery in legacy and enterprise systems without a risky full rewrite.

• The realistic timeline and leadership commitment required to move from quarterly releases to multiple deployments per day.

• The practical difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment, and how to adapt CD to different constraints and industries.

• The minimum technical and cultural requirements for continuous delivery, including trunk-based development and reliable pipelines.

• How to approach CD incrementally, starting with continuous integration and value stream mapping.

• Why long-lived, product-focused teams improve accountability, ownership, and delivery outcomes.

• How to use metrics to measure speed, cost of change, and feedback loops, without turning them into vanity or control metrics.

• Why continuous delivery demands discipline and quality practices, and why it’s the opposite of “cowboy coding.”

Bryan Finster is a DevOps and continuous delivery practitioner with over 25 years of hands-on experience building and operating mission-critical delivery systems in complex, enterprise environments. He works with organizations to modernize legacy systems, implement secure CI/CD pipelines, and make continuous delivery practical, not theoretical.

Bryan is also the maintainer of MinimumCD.org and DojoConsortium.org, where he focuses on improving software delivery through disciplined, incremental change.

Resources:

• Find Bryan on LinkedIn or GitHub - he’s always open to chat on this topic and share experience.

• Check out the Minimum Viable CD Website

• Find Katerina on LinkedIn

Content Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to CTO Insights

01:20 The Journey to Continuous Delivery

03:31 Challenges and Benefits of Continuous Delivery

05:40 Continuous Delivery in Different Contexts

07:44 Minimum Requirements for Continuous Delivery

12:48 Incremental Steps to Implement Continuous Delivery

18:39 Organizational Changes and Team Dynamics

22:32 Measuring the Impact of Continuous Delivery

26:09 Common Misconceptions About Continuous Delivery

30:08 Final Advice for CTOs and Engineering Leaders

32:50 Conclusion and Contact Information

Brought to you by

• Adeva — Global network of top developers connecting businesses with world-class talent.

In this episode of CTO Insights, I sat down with Farah Chabchoub, CTO at Worklife, to discuss the inevitable shift from growth at all costs to building a financially sustainable tech company.

Farah shares how aligning engineering efforts with strategic business goals is the key to driving operational excellence and stability. She talks about the practical steps and frameworks she uses to help late-stage startups transition their focus toward profitability and sustainability. This conversation is packed with valuable insights for engineering leaders navigating the complexities of changing growth strategies.

What you’ll learn

• The critical role of a CTO in guiding a company to become EBITDA positive (i.e., profitable).

• How to balance delivery speed with long-term company health.

• Effective frameworks for assessing and improving team productivity and efficiency.

• Strategies for building roadmaps that integrate financial sustainability.

• The importance of aligning product initiatives with financial goals.

• Practical advice on engaging the board with technical initiatives.

• How to leverage AI for cost-effective product innovation and iteration.

• Managing the shift from hyper-growth to financially sustainable practices.

• Insightful methods for aligning team efforts with strategic business objectives.

• Building a resilient team culture to support transitions and change management.

Farah Chabchoub is a champion for helping startups and scale-ups achieve excellence for sustainable growth. As the Chief Technology Officer at a leading French HR fintech acquired by a top global bank, Farah brings over eight years of experience in driving tech excellence and leading modern engineering teams through phases of hypergrowth, acquisition, and corporate integration.

Known for her ability to navigate exit strategies and post-acquisition transformations successfully, she is also the author of the Build Quality newsletter and an active speaker sharing insights on scaling, quality, and tech governance. Farah believes that successful scale-ups are built on strong foundations, focusing on creating high-performing businesses where technology serves as a strategic asset at the executive and board levels.

Resources:

• Farah Chabchoub on LinkedIn

• Worklife Website

• Katerina Trajchevska on LinkedIn

Content Chapters:

00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview

01:11 Joining Post Series C: Challenges and Fixes

02:27 EBITDA Positive: A CTO’s Unique Goal

05:35 First Steps in a New Company

10:20 Aligning Product Roadmap with Financial Plan

16:20 AI and Product Development

17:49 The Cost of Poor Planning

21:57 Managing Team and Stakeholders During Tough Decisions

31:55 Mindset Shifts for Sustainable Growth

34:42 Final Advice for Engineering Leaders

Brought to you by

• Adeva — Global network of top developers connecting businesses with world-class talent.

I had the pleasure of hosting Egil Osthus, CEO and co-founder of Unleash, to talk about how enterprise teams can move away from rigid, high-risk release cycles to safer, faster, and more iterative delivery. Egil shares how he led a 500-person engineering org from quarterly (and even yearly) releases to a deploy-whenever model—despite legal constraints, stakeholder objections, and legacy systems.

We talk through the real-world playbook: how to manage stakeholder expectations, start small, build trust, and keep momentum with early wins. From feature flags to feedback loops, this episode is packed with practical strategies for engineering leaders who want to modernize release processes without triggering chaos.

What you’ll learn

• How to shift from long release cycles to frequent, low-risk deployments

• Why stakeholder alignment is more important than technical tooling

• How to introduce change without triggering resistance

• Practical strategies for starting small and building trust across the org

• The role of feature management in enabling safer, iterative delivery

• How better feedback loops can improve product direction and team focus

• Why most developers already know this is the right way—and what’s still blocking them

• How to win over skeptics by reframing big changes as small experiments

• What leaders often get wrong about risk in modern release strategies

Egil Osthus is the CEO and co-founder of Unleash, an open-source feature management platform used by enterprises to ship software faster and safer. He’s an experienced engineering leader with a background in developer tools, large-scale software delivery, and organizational transformation.

Before starting Unleash, Egil held multiple leadership roles at Visma, one of Europe’s largest SaaS companies, where he led product development across international teams and drove the transition from long release cycles to continuous delivery.

Resources:

• Egil Osthus on LinkedIn

• Unleash Website

• Katerina Trajchevska on LinkedIn

Content Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to CTO Insights

01:10 Intro to Egil Osthus, CEO at Unleash

02:50 Challenges in Enterprise Release Processes

04:48 Transitioning to Continuous Delivery

06:01 Stakeholder Management and Communication

11:02 Practical Implementation Strategies

26:00 The Role of Tooling in Modern Release Strategies

27:32 Customer Feedback and Feature Management

32:27 Common Mistakes and Final Advice

Brought to you by

• Adeva — Global network of top developers connecting businesses with world-class talent.

I had the pleasure of hosting Laura Tacho, CTO at DX, to discuss what actually helps engineering teams perform better. We got into how to use both self-reported data and system data to understand your team, why metrics should never be used for individual performance, and how AI is changing developer workflows (and what it’s not doing yet).

From scrappy startup practices to company-wide DevEx strategies, this episode is packed with practical ways to build healthier, higher-performing engineering teams.

What you’ll learn

• How DX helps teams boost performance through developer intelligence

• Why self-reported data can surface quick, actionable insights

• What makes a developer survey actually useful — and how to get teams to respond

• How to use system data to save time and streamline engineering workflows

• Why developers already know where the friction is — and how to tap into it

• How starting simple with metrics early on can build better habits as you grow

• The risks of using metrics to judge individual performance — and how to avoid them

• Where AI tools really stand today — more autocomplete than autonomous

• How to let data guide your decisions when introducing AI tools

Laura Tacho is CTO at DX, a developer intelligence platform, co-author of the Core 4 developer productivity metrics framework, and an executive coach. She's an experienced technology leader and engineering leadership coach with a strong background in developer tools and distributed systems.

Her career includes leadership roles at organizations such as CloudBees, Aula Education, and Nova Credit, where she specialized in building high-performing engineering teams and delivering impactful products. Laura has worked with thousands of engineering leaders as they work to improve their engineering practices with data.

Resources:

• Laura’s Survey Templates to help you get started with gathering developer experience data.

• SWE-bench—a tool that evaluates how well AI models can complete real software engineering tasks end-to-end, highlighting the current limits of autonomous agents.

• Laura Tacho on LinkedIn

• DX Website

• Katerina Trajchevska on LinkedIn

Content Chapters:

[0:00] Introduction to CTO Insights

[1:11] The Role of Data in Developer Experience

[4:19] Balancing Quantitative and Qualitative Data

[7:15] Common Pitfalls in Using Metrics

[8:33] Adapting Surveys to Specific Teams

[10:39] Common Developer Friction Points

[12:28] Starting Metrics in Early-Stage Startups

[15:29] AI's Impact on Developer Workflows

[18:10] Setting Realistic AI Expectations

[20:31] Final Advice for Engineering Leaders

Brought to you by

• Adeva — Global network of top developers connecting businesses with world-class talent.

In this episode, I sat down with Mojtaba Hosseini, VP of Engineering at Zapier, to talk about how their team builds for long-term performance. We explored how they stay close to customers, make learning a habit, and use metrics that actually help the team improve. Mojtaba also shared how they're using AI in practical ways across the company.

What You’ll Learn

• Why engineering is applied science in service of the customer

• How customer focus shapes culture and drives engineering decisions

• What “high performance” really means, and why it’s about the slope of learning

• How Zapier built a team-driven approach to metrics over four years

• What to measure—and what not to—when evaluating developer productivity

• How engineering can support other teams in adopting AI

• Why “always be learning” is a core engineering principle

• How to build habits of sharing and experimentation across teams

Mojtaba Hosseini is VP of Engineering at Zapier, where he’s spent the last several years building high-performing teams grounded in customer focus, data, and continuous learning. With a systems-thinking approach to leadership, Mojtaba has led Zapier’s engineering team through a four-year journey of defining meaningful metrics, shifting measurement from a top-down requirement to a team-driven habit.

He’s been leading Zapier’s efforts to bring AI into day-to-day work—helping engineers work more efficiently and supporting other teams across the company. He combines deep technical experience with hands-on leadership to build engineering teams that scale with focus, clarity, and impact.

Resources:

• Mojtaba Hosseini on LinkedIn

• Zapier Website

• Katerina Trajchevska on LinkedIn

Content Chapters:

• 00:00 Introduction to Engineering Leadership at Zapier

• 03:50 Customer-Centric Engineering: The Feedback Loop

• 10:05 Defining High Performance in Engineering

• 15:29 The Journey of Implementing Engineering Metrics

• 26:37 Evaluating Metric Effectiveness

• 30:57 Leveraging AI for Developer Efficiency

• 34:19 Cross-Departmental Collaboration and AI Integration

• 38:51 Wrapping Up

Brought to you by

• Adeva — Global network of top developers connecting businesses with world-class talent.

In this episode of CTO Insights, I’m joined by Julien Lavigne du Cadet, now CTO at Lottie and formerly the CTO who led Zoe’s growth from zero to nine-figure ARR.

Julien brings deep experience in growing engineering teams and products through rapid scale. We unpack what it takes to balance structure with speed, how to build the right platform teams, and where automation makes the biggest impact. Whether you’re navigating early-stage chaos or planning for scale, this one’s packed with hard-earned lessons.

What you’ll learn:

• How to balance structure and speed in early-stage startups without over-engineering.

• The real challenges at each growth stage - from 0 to 9-figures ARR.

• When to promote from within vs. bringing in external talent.

• Why team clarity beats micromanagement for driving output.

• How a consistent analytics framework keeps data from turning into chaos.

• What it takes to maintain high standards while scaling fast.

• How to free up your engineers by automating customer support.

• What Julien would do differently and why iterating on process matters more than getting it perfect the first time.

Resources:

• Julien Lavigne du Cadet on LinkedIn

• Katerina Trajchevska on LinkedIn

Content Chapters:

[00:00] The Journey from Zero to Nine Figures

[03:55] Balancing Structure and Agility in Startups

[06:53] Navigating Growth Challenges and Leadership Flexibility

[10:13] Hiring Strategies: Internal Growth vs. External Talent

[12:55] Building Effective Teams and Standardizing Processes

[15:58] The Role of Analytics and Data Consistency

[19:04] Maintaining Agility During Scaling

[22:09] Optimizing Customer Support and Product Efficiency

[25:08] Learning from Mistakes and Decision-Making Strategies

In this episode of CTO Insights, I had the pleasure of hosting Alex Kroman, Chief Product and Technology Officer at AssemblyAI, to explore the evolving role of the combined Chief Product and Technology Officer position and its impact on creating high-performing engineering teams.

Here are the main takeaways from this episode:

• Combining the CPO and CTO roles helps eliminate silos, align priorities under one unified vision, and create clearer accountability.

• Instead of separating feature work from infrastructure or developer experience initiatives, Alex emphasizes having one comprehensive roadmap.

• Every planning cycle begins by identifying a clear North Star metric and then mapping both product and tech efforts to move that needle.

• Velocity isn’t about pushing teams harder; it’s about removing friction.

• Metrics like deploy frequency, mean time to recovery, and off-hours paging are useful but only when viewed in balance.

• Titles matter less than mindset. Product managers with technical curiosity and engineering managers who understand user needs tend to create more collaborative, high-functioning teams.

• Even if roles remain distinct, Alex actively seeks PMs who understand tech and engineering managers who care about product outcomes.

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global network of top developers connecting businesses with world-class talent. Whether you need to scale your team or bring an idea to life, Adeva empowers you to increase your engineering capacity without the overhead of traditional hiring.

Learn more about Adeva.

In this episode of CTO Insights, I had the pleasure of hosting Georgina Shute, Founder of KindTwo, to discuss why diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones. Following her own ADHD diagnosis, Georgina has dedicated herself to empowering leaders and organizations to understand and leverage the unique strengths of neurodiverse teams.

We also share common misconceptions about neurodiverse employees, strategies for creating inclusive tech teams, and actionable insights for CTOs looking to leverage diverse thinking styles as a competitive advantage. Georgina points out, "People aren't broken and we don't need to be fixed. I think there are different environments where people thrive in different ways."

Here are the main takeaways from this episode:

• Neurodiversity is a competitive advantage, not a challenge to fix. High-performing teams thrive when they leverage diverse ways of thinking rather than forcing everyone into the same mold.

• Psychological safety is the foundation of innovation. When individuals feel safe to work in ways that suit them, they contribute more creatively and effectively, boosting team performance.

• Leadership is evolving from management to system design. The best leaders won't just manage teams; they'll create inclusive structures where every individual can contribute at their best.

• Workplaces weren't designed for neurodivergent minds, but they should be. Instead of expecting individuals to adapt to rigid systems, companies must build environments where diverse talent can thrive.

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global network of top developers connecting businesses with world-class talent. Whether you need to scale your team or bring an idea to life, Adeva empowers you to increase your engineering capacity without the overhead of traditional hiring. Learn more about Adeva.

Learn more about Adeva

I had the pleasure of hosting Allison McMillan, Founder of Tavlin Consulting and Fractional VP of Engineering, to discuss strategies for building high-performing engineering teams. With her experience in leadership roles at GitHub and QuarterPath, Allison brings valuable insights into enhancing communication and collaboration within engineering organizations.

We dive deep into the challenges of scaling engineering teams while maintaining high performance. Allison points out, "You don't want your engineering team operating in the same way they did when you were a small and scrappy startup." This shift requires a delicate balance between maintaining innovation and implementing the necessary structure.

Here are the main takeaways from this episode:

• High-performing teams require intentional building. Allison's three core hiring criteria - growth mindset, kindness, and collaboration - create the foundation for sustained excellence.

• The definition of "high-performing" evolves as companies scale. What works for a startup (speed, scrappiness) must mature into more structured approaches that consider security, compliance, and scalable architecture.

• Tech debt management is crucial for team morale. Rather than viewing it as an endless burden, teams need a clear visualization of impact and effort to make it actionable.

• SPACE metrics provide more valuable insights than DORA metrics by incorporating developer experience and perception into performance measurement.

• Meeting efficiency directly impacts developer productivity. The key isn't eliminating meetings entirely but making them purposeful and engaging, sometimes replacing days of async communication with focused synchronous discussions.

• Effective contractor integration requires careful consideration of project isolation, team morale, and clear communication expectations.

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global network of top developers connecting businesses with world-class talent. Whether you need to scale your team or bring an idea to life, Adeva empowers you to increase your engineering capacity without the overhead of traditional hiring.

Learn more about Adeva.

I had the pleasure of hosting Sven Peters, Developer Advocate at Atlassian to discuss Developer Experience, a topic that increasingly catches the attention of engineering leaders.

We start the discussion with some mindblowing stats from the recent Developer Experience report, released by Atlassian. According to it, 69% of developers lose eight or more hours per week to inefficiencies. 69%. That’s a full day lost weekly due to the inability to organize work in a way that empowers productivity.

Sven argues that developer joy is the single most important factor directly impacting the team's performance. Increasing it reduces inefficiencies. Or vice-versa. The bottom line is that when traditional metrics fail us, measuring developer joy will likely open perspectives that guide us toward more productive work. So, we talk about concrete actions they’ve taken at Atlassian, how they track developer joy, and what we can learn from the process.

Here are the main takeaways from this episode:

• 69% of developers lose eight or more hours per week to inefficiencies and less than half of them believe leaders are aware of these issues. On the other hand, nearly 40% of leaders use lines of code and hours worked to measure performance. There’s a huge discrepancy between leadership and engineering that only contributes to the team’s inefficiency.

• Based on Atlassian’s research, Tech Debt is the number one reason developers lose time.

• Leaders often misunderstand the challenges developers face and the first step in resolving them is improving the communication between developers and leaders.

• Developer joy correlates with productivity and satisfaction. Regular surveys can help measure developer satisfaction and continued investment in improving the metrics directly contributes to increased performance.

• Empowering teams to solve their problems increases engagement and creates a culture of continuous improvement and higher work satisfaction.

• Quality assistance, a process where developers own the quality with a handful of QA experts to assist them, helps developers take responsibility for their code and improve the general team performance.

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global talent network that connects companies with top-tier tech and product talent, ready to hit the ground running. With the ability to introduce a candidate within 24 hours and an exceptional 98% success rate on trial engagements, Adeva offers the flexibility for companies to scale their teams up or down as needed.

If you’re looking to expand your team, drive momentum in new projects, or need to backfill a role, Adeva might be the solution you need.

Learn More About Adeva

I had the pleasure of hosting David Heinemeier Hansson, co-owner and CTO at 37signals. Known for its commitment to work-life balance and focusing on outcomes over hours, 37signals has set a strong example in the industry. So, I was thrilled by the opportunity to hear David’s take on team performance, especially how to achieve more with less.

In our conversation, we explore why overwork often signals poor organization and how to build a culture that enables people to accomplish more while working less. We discuss the value of flow over busyness, challenge the need for traditional metrics, and examine the unconventional approaches that have allowed 37signals to consistently deliver exceptional products for over 20 years.

Here are the main takeaways from this episode:

• Overwork is often a sign of poor organization, not commitment—and it frequently comes at the expense of productivity. Creating a culture of flow, on the other hand, boosts productivity without requiring overwork.

• “You can do big things with small teams, but it’s hard to do small things with big teams.“

• The right tools can significantly impact productivity.

• The use of the ShapeUp framework encourages autonomy and flexibility in teams. In comparison, Scrum can become overly process-driven, losing sight of the actual customer needs.

• Enterprise software often becomes overly complex due to customer demands and feature creep can lead to a product becoming worse over time.

• Short-term planning allows for more flexibility and responsiveness. Avoiding traditional KPIs and roadmaps has helped Basecamp maintain agility over the years.

• Building great software requires a commitment to quality and user experience and a sustainable business model prioritizes profitability over rapid growth.

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global talent network that connects companies with top-tier tech and product talent, ready to hit the ground running. With the ability to introduce a candidate within 24 hours and an exceptional 98% success rate on trial engagements, Adeva offers the flexibility for companies to scale their teams up or down as needed.

If you’re looking to expand your team, drive momentum in new projects, or need to backfill a role, Adeva might be the solution you need.

Learn More About Adeva

We discussed the challenges of traditional team structures and the importance of intentional team organization. Manuel emphasized the need for continuous evolution in organizations, understanding how the team structure and interactions between teams should evolve to enable faster flow. He shared insights on restructuring for high performance, enabling autonomy within the teams, and moving the role of management toward providing context rather than planning work.

Here are the main takeaways from this episode:

• What are the key aspects of the Team Topologies framework and how do they influence the team's performance?

• Cognitive load and its effect on the team’s performance and delivery speed.

• Intentionality in team organization as a key to high-performing teams.

• Continuous evolution vs. immediate transformation in large organizations: how can mature organizations transition to the Team Topologies framework?

• Team Topologies mindset: how can startups take advantage of the framework without formal implementation?

• Moving the role of management toward providing context as opposed to planning work.

Listen now on Apple and Spotify.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global talent network that connects the world’s best companies with the world’s best tech talent.

Adeva provides access to a global network of top-tier tech and product talent, ready to hit the ground running. With the ability to introduce a candidate within 24 hours and an exceptional 98% success rate on trial engagements, Adeva offers the flexibility for companies to scale their teams up or down as needed.

If you’re looking to expand your team, drive momentum in new projects, or need to backfill a role, Adeva might be the solution you need.

Learn More About Adeva

With a unique stance on the notion of the '10x developer', Gregor challenges what the industry values in their highest performers. Does this unicorn that performs 10x the regular developer exist? Or is a 10x developer simply someone who knows how to pull out the best in others, so that together, they 10x the team performance? Fascinating view on individual vs. collective performance.

Tapping in his own experience as a CTO and thousands of hours of research for his Engineering Leadership publication, Gregor shares his insights on structuring teams and empowering good relationships, including curating the hiring process and setting clear expectations. He also discusses the negative impact of perfectionism, the importance of setting deadlines, and the role of managers in creating a supportive and collaborative environment.

Here are the main takeaways from this episode:

• A great culture, good process, and a positive mindset are crucial for team and individual performance.

• Building good relationships and effective collaboration are key to creating high-performing teams.

• Empathy and helping others are important qualities for developers, and the '10x developer' is someone who multiplies their impact by making others better.

• Successful hiring focuses on candidates who are team players and show a deep interest in the business and product.

• Clear expectations and regular feedback create a supportive and collaborative environment.

• Prioritizing value delivery over perfectionism leads to faster customer outcomes.

• Involving engineers in customer discussions and feedback provides a better understanding of user needs.

• Metrics are valuable for tracking progress, but they should be interpreted carefully and not used as the sole measure of performance.

Check out Gregor’s Newsletter for a deeper dive into all of this.

Listen now on Apple and Spotify.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global talent network that connects the world’s best companies with the world’s best tech talent.

Adeva provides access to a global network of top-tier tech and product talent, ready to hit the ground running. With the ability to introduce a candidate within 24 hours and an exceptional 98% success rate on trial engagements, Adeva offers the flexibility for companies to scale their teams up or down as needed.

If you’re looking to expand your team, drive momentum in new projects, or need to backfill a role, Adeva might be the solution you need.

Learn More About Adeva

After a short summer break, we're excited to kick off the second season of CTO Insights! We've got an incredible lineup of guests, starting with Drew Falkman, Principal at Moves the Needle, a product consulting company. Drew is also a former CTO, advisor to multiple startups, product consultant, and LinkedIn instructor whose CTO course has been watched by over a quarter million engineering leaders worldwide.

In our conversation, Drew shared valuable insights into what it takes to succeed as a CTO. He emphasized that the CTO role is, above all, a people job. As counterintuitive as it may be, Drew explains why skills like delegation, planning, and managing teams and other executives are just as important—if not more—than technical expertise. I especially appreciated his thoughts on deep work as a key driver of team productivity, highlighting that it's the CTO's job to enable it.

Here are the main takeaways from this episode:

• Being a successful CTO requires a balance between understanding and managing technology and leading and collaborating with various teams within the organization.

• CTOs need to develop people skills and embrace the people aspect of the job, including managing up, being comfortable with uncertainty, and creating a strong culture.

• The ability to manage the inherent friction points between technology and product is key to ensuring peak team performance.

• Effective CTOs collaborate with other departments, such as sales, marketing, and support, understand their needs, and leverage technology to solve challenges.

• The CTO plays a crucial role in setting up the right environment for flow, including structuring meetings effectively and providing uninterrupted blocks of time for deep work.

• When making decisions about buying a ready solution versus building your own, it's important to consider the specific requirements, cost-benefit analysis, scalability, and long-term goals.

• Finding the right balance between hiring internally and working with external partners requires a clear understanding of the qualifications and needs of the role, as well as effective communication and support for internal candidates.

Check out Drew’s course to dig deeper into the topic.

Listen now on Apple and Spotify.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global talent network that connects the world’s best companies with the world’s best tech talent.

Adeva provides access to a global network of top-tier tech and product talent, ready to hit the ground running. With the ability to introduce a candidate within 24 hours and an exceptional 98% success rate on trial engagements, Adeva offers the flexibility for companies to scale their teams up or down as needed.

If you’re looking to expand your team, drive momentum in new projects, or need to backfill a role, Adeva might be the solution you need.

Learn More About Adeva

Brought to you by Adeva, the go-to place for hiring tech and product consultants.

I had the pleasure of hosting J.B. Rainsberger, Business and Software Coach helping companies profit sooner from their software projects while empowering individuals to navigate the complex world of work. His approach is all about less stress and more energy to bring to the parts of the job that create value.

The notion of “Programming is the easy part” comes again as a focal point of the discussion as we dig into what the actual difficult parts of work are. J.B. explains how, when he’s coaching teams, the challenges he sees are almost always about policies and people relations and rarely about code and architecture.

We explore common causes of delays and stress at work, together with his insights on improving delivery and overall performance by adjusting the working habits on an individual level.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why J.B. considers programming to be the easy part and how to navigate the other complexities at work.

• Improving performance and reducing stress often requires accepting how things are at your company without feeling the urge to change everything.

• How to keep a narrow focus on your priorities by practicing the habit of safely forgetting.

• How feature slicing and daily releases help overall team performance even when practiced on an individual level.

Listen now on Apple and Spotify.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global talent network that connects the world’s best companies with the world’s best tech talent.

Adeva provides access to a global network of top-tier tech and product talent, ready to hit the ground running. With the ability to introduce a candidate within 24 hours and an exceptional 98% success rate on trial engagements, Adeva offers the flexibility for companies to scale their teams up or down as needed.

If you’re looking to expand your team, drive momentum in new projects, or need to backfill a role, Adeva might be the solution you need.

Learn More About Adeva

Brought to you by Adeva, the go-to place for hiring tech and product consultants.

In this episode, I’m speaking with Natalia Tepluhina, Principal Engineer at GitLab, Vue.js core team member, and Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies. I’ve always been fascinated by Gitlab and the async culture they foster, so I was really looking forward to exploring how working asynchronously might benefit the team's performance. And Natalia had a lot to share on the topic.

The biggest highlight for me is how ruthlessly they eliminate meetings by keeping a disciplined approach toward what makes a meeting material. So much so, that even their planning is done async, not surprisingly using GitLab epics and issues. Definitely a perspective worth getting.

Here are all of the topics we discuss in this episode:

• GitLab’s team structure and work organization.

• Planning yearly on a very high level, then working on short milestones.

• Tech debt as a product priority vs. engineering priority.

• All things async - from planning using issues and epics, to daily standups and team coordination.

• Ensuring a meeting is worth having by preparing a detailed agenda and discussion points upfront. No agenda, no meeting.

• Documentation as the foundation of async work.

• Measuring by results, not hours.

Listen now on Apple and Spotify.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global talent network that connects the world’s best companies with the world’s best tech talent.

Adeva provides access to a global network of top-tier tech and product talent, ready to hit the ground running. With the ability to introduce a candidate within 24 hours and an exceptional 98% success rate on trial engagements, Adeva offers the flexibility for companies to scale their teams up or down as needed.

If you’re looking to expand your team, drive momentum in new projects, or need to backfill a role, Adeva might be the solution you need.

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Brought to you by Adeva, the go-to place for hiring tech and product consultants.

I had the pleasure of hosting Kent Beck, one of the key people who shaped Software Engineering as we know it. Kent is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto. He introduced Test-Driven Development, Software Design Patterns, and created JUnite.

Embarked on a personal mission to help geeks feel safe in the world, Kent continuously introduces concepts that aim to empower high performance while instilling a sense of safety in engineers.

In this episode, we discuss:

• XP and how it evolved organically from an intuitive approach for rapid delivery to a methodology that instantly made sense for teams.

• The main principles of XP along with practical approaches for implementing it within modern engineering teams.

• Importance of communication as a foundation for XP.

• Cost of software and how balancing the software design and feature development can improve the team’s performance and ability to deliver new features quickly.

Kent emphasizes the social nature of software engineering and the importance of daily communication to deliver the most value. As he puts it, being a technical virtuoso is not enough to succeed. There’s much more to it; there’s the context of the code that you need to write.

XP relies on engineering excellence, but it equally emphasizes the role of communication and collaboration. Many engineers testify that their peak performance has been in teams that do XP, yet not enough practice it regularly. So, apart from the theory, we focus on the much-needed practical guidance for teams looking to replace their current software development practices with XP.

Talking about team performance, Kent adds the importance of balance between code design and feature work. There’s this tug of war between business people and engineers. The former pulling toward shiny new features. The latter toward spotlessly clean code. Striking the right balance could empower teams to release new features at a fraction of the time.

Listen now on Apple and Spotify.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global talent network that connects the world’s best companies with the world’s best tech talent.

Adeva provides access to a global network of top-tier tech and product talent, ready to hit the ground running. With the ability to introduce a candidate within 24 hours and an exceptional 98% success rate on trial engagements, Adeva offers the flexibility for companies to scale their teams up or down as needed.

If you’re looking to expand your team, drive momentum in new projects, or need to backfill a role, Adeva might be the solution you need.

Learn More About Adeva

Brought to you by Adeva, the go-to place for hiring tech and product consultants.

Mite Mitreski is the CTO of Signicat, the leading provider of digital identity solutions in Europe. They’re on a mission to bring trust in the digital world. Companies use Signicat to onboard customers, sign agreements, manage user logins, and automate identity workflows – while fighting fraud and staying compliant across multiple markets.

Before Signicat, Mite was an engineering director and part of the CTO office at Klarna. He brings intensive experience in engineering leadership and great insights in high-performing teams.

In this conversation, we explore:

• Signicat’s team structure and processes for software delivery.

• How does developer experience and understanding of the big picture affect performance and how do performance metrics?

• What’s the role of QA in Signicat and how does that affect performance?

• How much of the performance is due to tooling and infrastructure?

• What’s the hiring process at Signicat and how do they ensure smooth onboarding and high team retention?

• What’s the difference between developing APIs for public and private use? What learnings can any team pick up from this?

Mite emphasizes the importance of team autonomy in driving progress at Signicat. They have certain standards, but every team is generally free to choose their own processes. Their most successful teams deploy multiple times per day, and we explore their strategy for expanding this approach across the board.

Even though they depend on manual QA due to the industry they’re in, Mite emphasizes the importance of automation and how can manual testing negatively affect the overall team performance.

According to Mite, “The moment you start using metrics for performance directly is the moment they start to be gamed.” He believes that an understanding of the big picture and good developer experience have a much higher impact on the team's performance than any metric you can choose.

Listen now on Apple and Spotify.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global talent network that connects the world’s best companies with the world’s best tech talent.

Adeva provides access to a global network of top-tier tech and product talent, ready to hit the ground running. With the ability to introduce a candidate within 24 hours and an exceptional 98% success rate on trial engagements, Adeva offers the flexibility for companies to scale their teams up or down as needed.

If you’re looking to expand your team, drive momentum in new projects, or need to backfill a role, Adeva might be the solution you need.

Learn More About Adeva

Brought to you by: Adeva, the go-to place for hiring tech and product consultants.

Ryan Singer is the author of Shape Up, a framework that has changed the way modern leaders approach planning and managing software development. As part of the founding team of Basecamp, Ryan deeply influenced the early software-as-a-service industry. Over 17 years, he designed features used by millions and invented processes for designing, developing, and shipping software, evolving from UI Designer to Head of Strategy. He’s now fully focused on supporting product and engineering leaders to enhance the performance of their teams by implementing the Shape Up framework.

In this conversation, we explore:

• What would a shaping team look like depending on the company's size and structure?

• How can teams incorporate Shaping without putting the big investment of completely dumping the current methodology and process they have in place?

• How can more junior team members thrive with the lack of detail that Shape Up promotes?

• How does the actual shaping process work?

• Common misconceptions about the framework and common challenges teams face.

• How to approach work on urgent requests and bug fixes without distracting the team from the planned work?

Ryan talks a lot about time bombs, pieces of work that have a lot of unknowns that pop up during development and delay the release. He explains how shaping can minimize these, by enabling you to identify and address any “time bomb“ before starting the actual development process.

The main idea of the Shape Up framework is to involve both product and engineering in the planning phase. By discussing the scope and shaping the idea together, the team can identify potential bottlenecks or large architectural changes that are time-consuming and can delay the whole project.

With the fixed time, variable scope approach, the team is empowered to adjust the scope of the work to deliver the most value with the same time investment.

It’s a very insightful conversation and I hope it challenges the way you view traditional software development.

Listen now on Apple and Spotify.

Ryan welcomes feedback and insights from teams that are looking to incorporate the Shape Up framework in their day-to-day work. Here’s where you can get in touch with him:

• Linkedin

• Website

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global talent network that connects the world’s best companies with the world’s best tech talent.

Adeva provides access to a global network of top-tier tech and product talent, ready to hit the ground running. With the ability to introduce a candidate within 24 hours and an exceptional 98% success rate on trial engagements, Adeva offers the flexibility for companies to scale their teams up or down as needed.

If you’re looking to expand your team, drive momentum in new projects, or need to backfill a role, Adeva might be the solution you need.

Learn More About Adeva

This was the main topic of my discussion with Anne-Laure Huin, VP of Engineering at Mollie and former Senior Engineering Manager at Uber. We delved into the impact of the hiring slowdowns on delivering value for customers and adapting the approach of shipping new features to make the most of the changed circumstances.

Interestingly, high performance for Anne-Laure is not about an all-senior team. We discussed balancing seniority within teams and how you can strategically grow with juniors and interns if you have a process in place to set them up for success.

Anne-Laure brings a lot of insights from her experience in Mollie and Uber. You’ll find this discussion especially valuable if you’re struggling to deliver at the same pace as you used to, without being able to scale your team accordingly.

Here are my favorite highlights from this episode:

• When scaling teams with limited resources, paying attention to the candidate’s alignment with the company’s vision and values can take you further than assessing tech skills only.

• Shipping new features with limited resources requires a deep understanding of the investment vs. impact of the planned feature.

• If you’re growing with junior hires, investing in effective onboarding and mentorship programs is crucial.

• Promoting from within is a good strategy if the person is ready and well aware of the expectations of the new role. It’s important to distinguish management and individual contributor tracks as distinct career paths, each with different requirements and opportunities to grow.

• Metrics are important and they give managers insight on what can be improved. However, managers play a crucial role in understanding and interpreting metrics, and it’s important to use them in context and not blindly trust them.

P.S. There seems to be a glitch with the Apple Podcast button on the side - if you’re unable to open the podcast using that button, try this link instead.

This episode is brought to you by Adeva, a global talent network that connects the world’s best companies with the world’s best tech talent.

Adeva provides access to a global network of top-tier tech and product talent, ready to hit the ground running. With the ability to introduce a candidate within 24 hours and an exceptional 98% success rate on trial engagements, Adeva offers the flexibility for companies to scale their teams up or down as needed.

If you’re looking to expand your team, drive momentum in new projects, or need to backfill a role, Adeva might be the solution you need.

Learn more about Adeva