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.
26episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
86: Why Communication Is Now a Core Skill for CTOs and Senior Engineering Leaders
Mar 1000:43:30Tap to summarizeWhat 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 communication is now a core leadership capability for enterprise technology leaders.Stepping into the role of business leader changes everything, and learning to speak the language of finance is essential inside the boardroom. The most effective CTOs build influence across the C-suite by understanding how the CFO, CMO, CEO, and head of sales each think about value. Kathleen reflects on her career in high-tech PR, from journalism at EDN to shaping innovation narratives at IBM Research and advising companies through IPO moments. Her experience shows how authority is built long before a keynote or media interview. If you’re focused on CTO leadership, executive communication, and increasing your influence in the enterprise, this conversation will challenge how you think about your role and your voice.You’ll Learn:[00:00] Introduction[01:32] Seeing yourself as a business leader shifts your authority inside the enterprise[02:18] Speaking finance earns real credibility in the boardroom[03:07] Building trust across the C-suite meaningfully changes your impact[04:12] Ignoring competitor visibility weakens your overall strategic presence[10:24] Early work with engineers exposed deep communication gaps[14:38] Turning complex tech into stories business leaders value[21:17] Innovation stories must clearly connect to business priorities[29:46] Thought leadership can significantly accelerate a CTO's career[37:52] Strong communication systems build influence long before you take the stageIf you’re a CTO approaching a high-stakes transition, whether that’s an IPO, major funding round, acquisition, or significant market repositioning, click here and take our FREE brand positioning assessment to benchmark your company’s messaging and discover if there are gaps between your leadership, marketing, and sales teams that need attention.You can connect with Kathleen on her 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 →85: From Firefighting to Flow: How CTOs Build Teams That Learn Fast
Mar 300:47:58Tap to summarizeWhat 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-based products in the clinical trials space, to unpack what “moving fast” really means in complex technical environments.As CTOs, we’re taught to value urgency. But when you’re debugging memory leaks across fragmented Android devices or responding to a vendor outage that brings your entire service down, speed starts to look different. The real question becomes when to stem the bleeding and when to slow down long enough to actually learn.We get into what that shift looks like in practice, how leadership changes when problems become learning opportunities, how postmortems build long-term velocity, and why incident response reveals the true operating system of your team.If you’re responsible for uptime, technical strategy, and building resilient teams, this episode will challenge how you think about speed, progress, and sustainable execution.You’ll Learn:[00:00] Introduction[04:32] Why fragmented Android devices force you to rethink what quality really means[06:48] How crash reports expose flawed assumptions you didn’t see[08:21] The difference between fixing pain fast and learning from the mistake[09:47] What to do when a vendor outage takes down your entire service[11:18] The tension between contractual SLAs and your own uptime standards[18:36] Why firefighting feels productive but fuels repeat failures[28:14] How postmortems turn incidents into long-term acceleration[39:52] The mindset shift from frantic execution to smooth accelerationClinical research shouldn’t be limited to a handful of sites. See how Inato helps sponsors reach more diverse patients, faster.You can connect with Bastien 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 →84: Why Your Definition of Done Is Limiting Engineering’s Business Impact
Feb 2400:11:39Tap to summarizeWhat 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 business impact? In this episode, I share a coaching story from a CTO leading a busy organization where motion looked like momentum, but nearly everything stalled just before completion. The teams were working hard, yet features lingered in limbo, ownership blurred, and frustration built across engineering and product.There is a mental model that reframes software delivery using a familiar sports analogy, showing why writing code or merging branches doesn’t move the scoreboard. Impact only happens when work reaches production, is absorbed by the organization, and enables the next move. This lens exposes how excessive work in progress stretches timelines, fragments focus, and erodes fulfillment for senior engineers.I talk about what changes when leaders stop tracking activity and start insisting on outcomes. For anyone responsible for CTO leadership, engineering productivity, or scaling teams without burning them out, this conversation challenges how you measure progress and where you apply pressure.You’ll Learn:[00:00] Introduction[01:12] How teams stay busy yet fail to move the business forward when finishing is unclear[02:08] What happens when too much work in progress creates motion without results[03:07] Why writing code and merging branches do not equal business impact[03:56] How the basketball scoreboard analogy reshapes what done really means[05:14] The leadership question that exposes activity over outcomes[06:41] What changes when nothing new starts until something is fully done[08:27] How redefining done restores ownership, focus, and team satisfactionFind 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 →83: Are We Building the Right Things? A CTO’s Guide to Influence, Ethics, and Responsible Innovation
Feb 1700:48:09Tap to summarizeWhat 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 shows up in the smallest day-to-day decisions, not the mission statements. A CTO mindset shifts once it becomes clear that the products being shipped shape how people work, think, and feel long after the roadmap is finished. Responsibility enters the work through a design-led lens that starts with user research and carries through product strategy grounded in usability, accessibility, and cognitive load.Earlier in my career, optimizing metrics felt sufficient. That belief changed after seeing software become a primary work tool for thousands of people who had little choice but to live inside it every day. Tech for good emerges here as a leadership posture rather than a side initiative, rooted in intention, influence, and awareness. Digital transformation sharpens that responsibility further, with the power to narrow or expand who technology truly serves as analog channels steadily disappear.If you’re navigating scale, pressure, and trade-offs as a technical leader, this episode is an invitation to slow down, ask better questions, and lead with impact rather than assumption.You’ll Learn:[00:00] Introduction[03:01] Why design-led products start with user research, not features[04:27] How optimizing for one metric creates invisible usability and accessibility debt[07:12] When you realize your software becomes someone’s full-time work environment[23:04] Why teams ship products without thinking through real-world user impact[29:18] How engagement algorithms shape behavior and quietly reward harmful patterns[31:07] What ethical leadership looks like without lecturing or moral grandstanding[35:02] Why AI feels revolutionary while productivity barely moves[42:21] Where tech leaders should start when thinking about impact and responsibility[47:00] How values, influence, and intent guide better technology decisionsResources Mentioned:No Silver Bullet Essence - Accident in Software Engineering by Brooks F. | ArticleYou can connect with Joe and his work through his LinkedIn 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 →82: Are You Running Fast in the Wrong Direction? A CTO’s Guide to Clarity with Jason McGhee
Feb 1001:09:40Tap to summarizeAre 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, machine learning, and product teams asking the hard question: why is the data changing?AI in analytics works best when it supports human judgment instead of replacing it. A hybrid approach keeps people involved while AI assists with complex tasks, making decisions clearer and systems easier to reason about. Moving faster with AI increases risk when teams cannot explain why the data is changing.Both recurring reports and one-off investigations break down without context. Dashboards often fail as real deliverables because they separate numbers from explanation. Insight becomes more actionable when it is shared alongside the data itself. Screenshots, slide decks, and disconnected tools add friction, making validation harder and discouraging deeper questions from leaders.If you care about data-driven decision making, want a more honest relationship with machine learning outputs, or are figuring out how generative AI fits into real-world business analytics, this conversation sharpens how you think about data, trust, and momentum as a technology leader.You’ll Learn:[00:00] Introduction[02:45] Why more data doesn’t help if you can’t explain what changed[05:12] How keeping humans in the loop changes AI analytics failure modes[09:48] Why dashboards break down once they leave the builder’s hands[14:32] How AI turns big analytical questions into auditable steps[20:41] Why one-off and recurring reports need shared intuition to work[27:18] How screenshots and slide decks quietly block data validation[34:55] Why faster AI increases the risk of running in the wrong direction[43:07] How mixing structured data with Slack adds missing business context[57:26] The leadership cost of treating analytics as outputs, not understandingFor more information you can also visit writ.so.You can connect with Jason on his personal LinkedIn or his business 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 →81: The Culture Playbook for High-Performing Engineering Teams — with CTO Pasha Jam
Feb 300:37:38Tap to summarizeWhat 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 engineering team from three people to 110, expanded internationally, and navigated company acquisitions while keeping culture a central focus. We define what a healthy engineering culture looks like, and why it consistently outperforms strategy and process.Culture became a priority after working in environments that were difficult to enjoy, even when the products and compensation were strong. Psychological safety is explored through the lens of engineering teams, including the ability to ask questions, raise risks, challenge decisions, and fail without fear.Culture’s impact on hiring, onboarding, and communication across teams in multiple countries is explored, along with why people who leave often say they miss the culture and sometimes choose to return.If you’re responsible for engineering teams and want to think more intentionally about culture, leadership, and long-term team health, this episode offers practical perspective grounded in lived experience.You’ll Learn:[00:00] Introduction [05:18] Why job dissatisfaction often traces back to culture instead of pay or products[06:42] What psychological safety looks like when engineers challenge decisions without fear[11:07] How empowerment leads teams to take ownership without being pushed[24:21] Why fixing incidents together matters more than assigning blame[28:36] How putting people before process changes commitment and delivery[30:14] Why micromanagement quietly erodes trust and culture[33:09] What it looks like when leaders carry culture forward without seeking credit[35:27] Why culture must evolve as teams scale and contexts changeResources Mentioned:Agile Manifesto | WebsiteNeed car repairs but not the upfront cash? If you're in the UK, get approved in seconds and pay interest‑free over time, apply with Bumper today and stay on the road.You can connect with Pasha Jam on his 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.
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