The CTO Playbook

Most CTOs chase value creation. Jaco Vermeulen says the real job is preserving it first.  Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Boards across the mid-market are running AI pilots that return nothing, and revenue is being bo...

Duri's father holds more than 100 patents, filed his latest one at 96, and gave him a one-line philosophy that now drives how his teams approach every problem: most people don't try. Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Most CT...

What if the biggest constraint on your organisation isn't your tech, your funding, or your market, but whether your leaders can think at the level the problem requires? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Logan Yonavjak spent...

The reps that used to turn juniors into seniors are disappearing, and most engineering leaders won't notice until the senior shortage hits in three years. Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Your dashboards say velocity is up,...

The most dangerous moment in a transformation isn't the start, it's the stretch right before behaviours actually start sticking. Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. My guest is Anders Wengelin, partner at Friktion in Malmö, wh...

When do you stop being the CTO with all the answers and start being the one who asks better questions? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Miguel Carranza built RevenueCat into critical infrastructure for thousands of mobile a...

Women weren't pushed out of tech once. There were multiple waves, and the patterns are still showing up in how teams get built today. Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Most engineering leaders think their hiring process is n...

Most CTOs are promoted for technical judgment, then get stuck trying to lead people with the same playbook that got them there . Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Ric Hill has spent 14 years running Ghyston with his wife, CT...

What if the biggest impact you have as a leader isn’t the strategy you set, but the signals you leave behind in every interaction? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. In this episode, Paul Kinkaid, a former British Army office...

What happens when execution matters more than strategy? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Adam Spector is a four-time founder and investor in over 200 startups. He has seen firsthand how quickly expectations have shifted, an...

A CTO hired a star engineer to push AI adoption forward, and within months, the team had lost its momentum, the new hire, and any sense of where they actually were. Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Almost every CTO Adam spe...

The difference between a good CTO and a trusted one often comes down to a personal playbook. Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Sam Boswell is the CTO of Terralayr, an energy tech company focused on solving global energy stor...

What if leadership isn’t about managing people, but about owning decisions? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. I’m joined by Michael Di Prisco, who describes himself as “a software engineer struggling to realize that he becam...

Most teams don’t have a data problem; they have a decision problem. Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Nic Granger, Chief Information and Financial Officer at the North Sea Transition Authority, joins me to share her perspect...

If your team feels busy but nothing meaningful gets delivered, this might explain why. Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Loïc Houssier, an engineering leader with two decades of experience across startups, scale-ups, and glo...

Why does the CTO role feel heavier after you start winning? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Many leaders in CTO leadership roles are shipping products, raising funding, and hiring well, yet describing a new weight in the r...

What if the biggest risk in your AI strategy isn’t the technology, but the assumptions you never question? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Today I’m joined by Jill Heinze, an AI Foresight and Strategy Architect who helps m...

What if the most underused asset in your tech organization is your voice? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. In this episode, I sit down with Kathleen Lucente, founder and CEO of Red Fan Communications, to explore why communi...

What if speed as a CTO has less to do with urgency and more to do with discipline? Build your own CTO Playbook at  www.theCTOplaybook.com  — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. In this episode, I sit down with Bastien Duret, CTO at a French-American company building web-b...

What if redefining one simple phrase could change how your entire organization delivers value? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Why does the definition of ‘done quietly’ determine whether engineering effort turns into real...

What if the most dangerous thing we build as leaders is certainty? Build your own CTO Playbook at  www.theCTOplaybook.com  — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Today, I sit down with fellow technology leader Joe Thompson, to examine how ethical technology leadership show...

Are you running faster with AI, or just running blind? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Most teams don’t lack data, they lack understanding. Today, I sit down with CTO Jason McGhee, who has spent years inside analytics, mac...

What if the strongest part of your engineering organization isn’t your tech stack, but the culture you protect every day?  Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. In this episode, I’m joined by CTO Pasha Jam, who has grown an e...

Your most powerful decision engine isn’t your data, your dashboards, or your AI, it’s your gut. Build your own CTO Playbook at  www.theCTOplaybook.com  — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. There is a topic that most technical leaders quietly wrestle with: gut instinct. N...

Most CTOs fail not because of bad decisions, but because they stop asking why. Build your own CTO Playbook at  www.theCTOplaybook.com  — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact.  In this episode, I sit down with Massimo Belloni, Head of Machine Learning and Data Science at D...