Podcast
The CTO Playbook
Hosted by Adam Horner · EN
Join Adam Horner, a CTO with over 30 years in the tech industry, on The CTO Playbook — the podcast dedicated to helping CTOs excel. Perfect for CTOs and tech leaders navigating the complexities of their roles, each episode offers clear insights, innovative strategies, and practical advice from top leaders in tech.
With Adam’s extensive experience mentoring engineers and tech leaders, and over a decade as a CTO, you’ll gain the tools and knowledge to build and refine your own CTO playbook. Whether you're tackling complex projects, fostering innovation, leading teams, or shaping your company's tech strategy, this podcast is your go-to resource.
Adam’s journey from engineer to strategic CTO was challenging. He learned through the school of hard knocks, making avoidable mistakes and facing countless challenges. Often out of his comfort zone and wishing for more guidance, he created this podcast to provide the support and advice he once lacked.
Tune in for engaging interviews, leadership tips, and the latest in technology strategy. Each episode is designed to help you lead with confidence and level up as a CTO.
Listen now to start your journey with The CTO Playbook and build your own playbook to excel in your role.
23episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
103: What CTOs Miss Before an M&A Deal Hits
1w ago00:49:41Tap to summarizeMost 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 booked long before it's ever realised. The gap between the story a business tells about itself and what's happening underneath has rarely been wider or more expensive.My guest is Jaco Vermeulen, an interim CTO, CIO, and M&A specialist who has worked through more than 50 transactions and spent 25 years finding what's hidden in that gap.Jaco doesn't want to talk about technology. He wants to talk about what the technology is meant to do for the business, and why most leaders get that order wrong. His stories from carve-outs, acquisitions, and portfolio integrations show how much value gets destroyed by assumptions nobody bothered to check.If you're an engineering or science leader who has never sat close to a transaction, this one will change how you read your own company. And if you have, you'll recognise the patterns immediately. Preserve value first. Create value second. Everything else follows from there.You'll Learn:[0:00] Introduction[4:02] CTO, CIO, CAIO: titles that mean the same thing to most businesses[9:10] A box of CDs and a $2 billion company still running on paper[15:00] The real reason AI pilots keep returning nothing[20:11] The hidden gaps in M&A due diligence that most tech leaders never look for[23:33] A company that paid £1 million a year to license data it already owned[26:34] ARR reporting and the disconnect between booked revenue and reality[29:55] A transaction's success is decided after the deal closes, not at signing[35:12] A £5 million pricing plan projected to return just £200,000 a year[38:21] The four steps every technology leader should take to be transaction-ready[45:44] The incentive hiding behind every KPI you're setFind more from Jaco Vermeulen on LinkedIn.Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.
Transcribe →102: AI Transformation Starts With What You Don't Know You're Assuming — with Duri Chitayat
2w ago00:46:42Tap to summarizeDuri'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 CTOs think AI failures are technical problems. The data says otherwise, and the gap between a good idea and a great product is almost never where engineers expect it to be.My guest today is Duri Chitayat, CTO at CINC Systems, leading a 170-person globally distributed product development team across four continents with a background spanning AdTech, MedTech, Banking, and FinTech.What stood out for me in this conversation was how willing Duri is to question the assumptions other leaders treat as fixed. He grew up around an inventor with over 100 patents, and that shaped a way of thinking that strips problems down to first principles before touching a solution.The stakes here are real. Innovation tokens are finite. Spend them on the wrong assumption, and you lose the race before you knew it started.Our conversation moves through a six-part playbook for leading engineering in 2026, the leadership paradox that breaks most CTOs, and why measuring transformation honestly is harder than anyone admits. If you're leading through an AI shift right now, this one is for you.You'll Learn:[0:00] Introduction[3:00] What growing up around a 96-year-old inventor with 100+ patents taught Duri about first principles[4:54] The difference between writing code and delivering solutions, learned the hard way on an SAP rollout[7:29] Mount Fuji problems versus dancing landscapes, and how to spend your innovation tokens wisely[12:59] Why the customer hanging a picture frame isn't really trying to hang a picture frame[14:55] Finding the borders of the box you didn't know you were in[24:22] Duri's only juniors are named Claude and Codex, and how he hires senior talent globally[28:03] How the RFC process creates earned trust and stops Duri from running roughshod over smart engineers[32:07] Walking through the six-part playbook[40:33] Why tokens burned is the new lines of code, and what to actually measure insteadResources Mentioned:Your Strategy Needs a Strategy by Martin Reeves, Knut Haanaes, Janmejaya Sinha | Book or AudiobookFind more from Duri on LinkedInFind more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.
Transcribe →101: Why Most Leadership Assessments Are Measuring the Wrong Thing
3w ago00:36:52Tap to summarizeWhat 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 nearly two decades in impact investing before co-founding Readiness Engine. Her perspective matters here because she watched the pattern play out across hundreds of well-resourced teams.The teams weren't short on capital. They were short on cognitive capacity to hold complexity, sit with paradox, and make decisions when the answer wasn't black-and-white. Most leadership assessments snapshot who you are. Logan argues they miss the part that predicts whether you're ready for what's coming next: how you think, not what you've done.In this episode, we get into developmental psychology, why coachability is the single biggest predictor of growth, and what it looks like to measure a leader's readiness rather than their résumé.For CTOs who've been told coaching is something other people get, this one reframes the conversation. The cost of staying fixed is higher than you think.You'll Learn:[0:00] Introduction[3:55] What impact investing actually means beyond profit-only capitalism[5:49] How developmental psychology measures the way adults hold paradox and perspective[10:40] Why coachability is the single biggest predictor of whether leaders can evolve[15:37] Myers-Briggs and most leadership assessments miss vertical development entirely[22:12] How the 45-minute video assessment works and why it's harder to game[24:40] Building a second brain that channels your highest self into team decisions[28:11] AI coaching could become the entry point for leaders allergic to therapy[34:33] What changes when investors start assessing their own leadership capacity before deploying capitalResources Mentioned:Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) | WebsiteFind more from Logan on LinkedIn, and see a sample Readiness Engine report here.Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.
Transcribe →100: Why AI Is Quietly Draining Your Senior Engineer Pipeline
4w ago00:22:23Tap to summarizeThe 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, your seniors are asking careful questions nobody wants to answer, and your juniors are getting confident faster than they're getting capable. I'm a coach for CTOs across startups and enterprises, and this is the pattern I've been hearing in coaching conversations for the last six months.It usually arrives as unease about velocity or quality. By the time we trace it back, it always lands in the same place. Does our boilerplate still earn its keep in an AI-accelerated world? One camp wants to lock it down further. The other wants to delete half of it. They're both right, and they're both wrong.The argument is a symptom. The real question is bigger, and almost nobody is pricing it in yet. Our most experienced engineers got their judgment from reps we can no longer reproduce. Our juniors aren't getting those reps. If we don't design a replacement, we'll wake up in a few years with a senior shortage and no good explanation for how it happened.This episode is about the scaffolding that fixes it.You'll Learn:[00:00] Introduction[00:22] The unease CTOs can't quite name yet[01:48] Three warning signals hiding inside a healthy-looking engineering team[03:45] Why both sides of the boilerplate debate are right and wrong at the same time[05:59] Why boilerplate is no longer just about code, it's doing three jobs now[08:44] The hidden dial between your code base and your AI that most teams haven't noticed[11:21] How senior engineering judgment was built and why AI has removed the mechanism[12:39] The senior shortage nobody sees coming and why your scaffolding is part of the answer[14:58] A five-step playbook for redesigning your scaffolding as a judgment toolFind more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.
Transcribe →99: Why Transformations Die Just Before They Succeed
Jun 800:58:28Tap to summarizeThe 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, who spends his weeks inside large Swedish healthcare organizations trying to help them build new core capabilities without reaching for a neat plan.Leaders kill change at the exact moment it's about to take hold. Not because the work is failing, but because nothing visible has shipped yet.Anders walks through how his team thinks about behaviours as the only concrete thing in an organization, and why operating models, maps and rollout plans are abstractions people hide behind. If you've ever felt the pull to add structure the moment ambiguity shows up, this one will sit with you.Three questions, nine parts, and one uncomfortable truth about what real change looks like inside large, regulated organizations.You'll Learn:[0:00] Introduction[2:40] Why large, compliance-heavy organizations struggle most with acquiring adaptivity[6:00] The detour every tech-heavy org takes before talking about what actually matters[14:06] Why leadership teams grasp for maps and plans the moment complexity shows up[21:13] The three questions behind Friktion’s transformation strategy playbook[30:00] The camera test for behaviours, and why curiosity isn't a behaviour[33:45] How behaviour spreads like a virus, and why rollouts never work[38:26] The three nested loops that keep continuous change moving[41:11] Success looks like nothing is happening right before momentum kicks in[45:41] Why you don't need a majority before behaviour change tips[52:34] The trap of sneezing at a crowd instead of infecting one context properlyWant to go deeper on everything Anders covered? Friktion's sandpapers are free to download at friktion.se/sandpapers.Find more from Anders on LinkedIn.Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.
Transcribe →98: The Office of the CTO at RevenueCat, with Miguel Carranza
Jun 100:47:46Tap to summarizeWhen 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 apps, and he'll tell you straight that he never wanted to be a manager.He got his first computer at age eight and moved from Sevilla to Silicon Valley to build things. Somewhere along the way, he had to stop being the best engineer in the room and start hiring people better than him.His worst hire is already on the team. That's not a red flag, it's the whole point of how he builds. The Office of the CTO, which he set up, exists precisely to keep that bar moving.The engineering managers who never wanted the job are the ones who work out. The smallest pull requests have caused the biggest outages. And AI is making his teams smaller, not larger.If you're a founder CTO trying to figure out when to delegate and when to dig in, this one will sit with you.You'll Learn:[00:00] Introduction[01:12] From Sevilla to Silicon Valley: what drove Miguel to chase computers over everything else[08:15] Building Elevate revealed a mobile subscription problem nobody had solved yet[10:48] What changed Miguel’s mind when he doubted himself as a CTO[17:16] Why engineering managers at RevenueCat must be ex-engineers first[20:31] The mental model Miguel uses to hire people better than himself[22:23] How AI is shrinking team sizes and who it benefits most[29:45] The small internal team Miguel deploys to new bets and stuck projects[35:49] The five rules Miguel refuses to bend on as an engineering leader[42:01] Why RevenueCat's biggest outages came from one-line pull requests[43:39] What actually makes RevenueCat's engineering culture distinctConnect more with Miguel on X and the RevenueCat website.Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.
Transcribe →97: Stop Hiring More of the Same — Michelle McDaid, The Leading Place
May 2500:46:45Tap to summarizeWomen 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 neutral. Changing the job spec brought my guest three women applicants the following week, and her team hired two of them. Michelle McDaid spent two decades leading globally distributed engineering teams, became the first female director of engineering at her last company, and left it with 50% women in that role.She then went back to university to put the evidence behind what she'd already seen on the ground. We sat with some of these ideas together at CTO Craft Con in London a couple of weeks ago, and the conversation was good enough that I wanted to bring it here. She's unusually calm about uncomfortable truths, and that's exactly why this matters. If you believe in diverse teams but keep ending up with more of the same, the gap isn't your intent. It's what you don't even know to look for. This one challenges the default assumptions most technical leaders never examine, and gives you something practical to do about it.You'll Learn:[00:00] Introduction[02:29] What trust actually has to do with uncovering the real problem in any organization [06:50] What Michelle's career across banking and tech revealed about leadership and self-worth [15:56] Why the gender gap in tech is neither natural nor inevitable [24:36] How the language in your job spec is quietly filtering out the people you want to hire [28:36] The smallest changes that move teams from fearful to collaborative and how AI fits in [33:47] A 10-point framework for intentionally broadening your talent pool [44:20] What women lose in meetings every day and how anyone can change it Resources Mentioned:The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart | BookWhere Did the Women Go? by Michelle McDaid | ArticleTextio | WebsiteGender Decoder by Kat Matfield | WebsiteLearn more from Michelle on her LinkedIn and The Leading Place website.Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.
Transcribe →96: Why the Best CTOs Don't Have a Playbook — Ric Hill, Ghyston
May 1800:41:40Tap to summarizeMost 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, CTO'd for startups and mid-corporates, and earned a spot on the CTO Craft 100. His central conviction is that there is no playbook worth following blindly.Most CTOs are promoted on technical skill and then judged on leadership. The reflex is to import what worked last time. Ric argues that reflex is the problem.What replaces the playbook is a sharper version of listening, knowing how long your "fresh eyes" window actually lasts, reading the difference between an unhealthy political culture and an unhealthy apathetic one, and noticing which person on your team has gone quiet.This is a conversation about staying flexible without being indecisive, and delivering results without forcing a template onto a situation that doesn't fit it.You’ll Learn:[00:00] Introduction[11:29] Why bespoke beats cookie-cutter software[13:50] The first few weeks decide everything[16:23] How long until you're part of the furniture[18:19] Health versus outcomes in tech leadership[20:21] The sticky note roadmap that changes everything[25:38] Disagree and commit without losing trust[28:40] When stubbornness becomes a liability[30:35] Listen for the silences in your team[32:59] Why engineering culture can stand apart[40:20] The one tip every new CTO needsCheck out Ghyston for your software development needs.Find more from Ric on LinkedIn.Listen to Ric’s podcast, Giant Minds: From The Bristol Tech Community, on Spotify or Apple.Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.
Transcribe →95: The Leadership Signals CTOs Send Without Realising It with Paul Kinkaid
May 1101:09:26Tap to summarizeWhat 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 officer, founder of Forensic Outcomes, and executive leadership coach, introduces a principle from forensic science: every contact leaves a trace. Those small moments, the way you listen, the way you respond, the way you make decisions, shape how your leadership is experienced across an organization.The focus is on the smallest behaviours that most leaders overlook, and how those behaviours shape trust, culture, and performance.Leadership isn’t just about decisions or strategy. It’s about the signals you send every day.You’ll Learn:[00:00] Introduction[00:06:02] What leadership presence is and why people listen before you speak[00:09:10] Why pressure exposes the difference between real and performative leadership[00:12:04] How small behaviours shape trust, clarity, and psychological safety[00:21:36] What happens when leaders send the wrong signals without realizing[00:34:12] Why the gap between intention and impact grows over time[00:48:27] How communication patterns shape culture more than strategy[01:02:14] What it takes to notice and shift the signals you sendResources Mentioned:Locard Exchange Principle by Saferstein, R., et al. | ArticleGet Paul’s book, Forensic Leadership, in print or audiobook and start noticing the signals you’re sending every day. Find more from Paul on LinkedIn, and visit his DactoApp landing page at Forensic Outcomes.Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.
Transcribe →94: Execution Beats Strategy? Rethinking the CTO Role in the Age of AI
May 400:44:10Tap to summarizeWhat 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, and why what worked even a few years ago no longer holds up. The bar for startups has moved. Companies that once raised capital on early traction are now expected to show real revenue, working products, and meaningful growth almost immediately.AI is beginning to change what teams can produce, even if it has not fully transformed day-to-day work yet. The pace is increasing, and the gap between what is possible and what most teams deliver is widening. Rigid strategy is becoming a liability. Founders who cannot adapt in real time are more likely to fail as conditions shift underneath them.Efficiency is under a new lens. Metrics like revenue per employee are becoming signals of how well a company actually operates. The underlying question is harder to ignore: what is your role when code is no longer the constraint?You’ll Learn:[00:00] Introduction[06:12] Why the bar for startups has changed faster than most founders realize[10:47] What investors expect now and why early traction is no longer enough[14:33] How AI is starting to affect workflows without fully replacing them[18:05] Why time is becoming the only truly scarce resource[22:41] What happens when startups grow fast but lack a real moat[27:18] Why rigid strategy increases your risk of failure[31:56] How revenue per employee is becoming a key efficiency signal[36:22] What breaks when competitors move faster than you[40:08] How to think about your role when code is no longer the constraintFind more from Adam Spector on LinkedIn and the Chore Website.Find more from Adam Horner on LinkedIn and YouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.
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