Claim Ownershipalphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders
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This podcast features interviews of CTOs and other technical leadership figures and topics range from technology (AI, blockchain, cyber, DevOps, Web Architecture, etc.) to management (e.g. scaling, structuring teams, mentoring, technical recruiting, product etc.).
Guests from leading tech companies share their best practices and knowledge.
The goal is to support other CTOs on their journey through tech and engineering, inspire and allow a sneak-peek into other successful companies to understand how they think and act. Get awesome insights into the world‘s top tech companies, personalities with this podcast brought to you by Tobias Schlottke.
Guests from leading tech companies share their best practices and knowledge.
The goal is to support other CTOs on their journey through tech and engineering, inspire and allow a sneak-peek into other successful companies to understand how they think and act. Get awesome insights into the world‘s top tech companies, personalities with this podcast brought to you by Tobias Schlottke.
111 Episodes
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How do we actually organize people to consistently deliver value and enjoy the process? This, Eric Bowman (CTO @ King) says, is the core challenge facing any CTO. In this thought-provoking episode, Eric shares insights from his remarkable career in gaming (The Sims, King), e-commerce (Zalando), and navigation technology (TomTom), offering a unique perspective on building high-performing teams and effective tech organizations.
Listen in to explore:
🔄 Outcome AND Outputs → Impact (ala Kent Beck’s Universal Value Streams)
🤖 Theory of Adjacent Possibility + Why AI isn’t there yet
⚖️ Product + Tech: Single-threaded (Amazon) vs. Dual Role (Marty Cagan or Google)
🎯 Goals: Kanban-Style Stack Ranking that limits Work-in-Progress
📈 ROI of Tech: Does it increase revenue or speed up delivery?
🧘 Discipline = Action & Commitment
+ is it time to rethink small teams and platform engineering?
Have a listen. It is rare to have such a great combination of experience 🦾, knowledge 📚 and wisdom 🧠 in one person.
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/111-eric-bowman-cto-king
Become a more effective team in this CTO podcast featuring Rebecca Murphey, Field CTO of Swarmia and co-author of Build. From her years of experience working in the developer productivity organizations at Stripe and Indeed and now at Swarmia, Rebecca knows this conversation isn’t just about developer metrics and productivity - it’s about the broader picture 🖼️. How do we align🧭 our engineering work with with business outcomes💸, developer experience 😀AND developer productivity⚡. And just as important, how do we communicate what we’re doing (and not doing) to other stakeholders?
Listen to find out:
🔄 Queuing Theory as paradigm for developer workflow evaluation
⏳ How to allocate time for different engineering tasks
👥 Team Metrics vs. 🧑💻 Individual Metrics
📊 Metrics: DORA, SPACE, BRAINs, and more
⚖️ The ethical debate on tracking developer metrics
🤔 If you optimize for the quarter, do you de-optimize for the future?
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/110-rebecca-murphey-field-cto-swarmia-and-co-author-of-build
Save Money on Cloud Costs with Claire Fautsch (CTO @ Joblift). Find out how the team at Joblift slashed monthly cloud costs from €100K to €30K without compromising performance.
Listen to find out:
📊 How to build dashboards
📈 How to align cloud costs with business KPIs
🤝 How to get the entire team involved in cost optimization (Spoiler Alert: No FinOps team)
🛠 How to optimize resource allocation and avoid over-provisioning
⚙️ Technical tweaks that made an impact: CUDs, Spot instances, SSD usage, network costs
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/109-claire-fautsch-cto-joblift
Brought to you by SmartRecruiters -https://link.alphalist.com/smartrecruiters.
Get 10% off when mentioning the alphalist CTO podcast
Keep an eye on the latest trends in this CTO podcast episode featuring Hannes Lenke (CEO and Co-founder of Checkly). Hannes shares insights from over a decade of shaping the testing and monitoring landscape. From AI-powered mobile testing to cloud-based browser testing to synthetic monitoring, he has seen it all.
Listen to found out:
👀 What is "Monitoring as Code"? How does it differ from traditional observability?
🔄 Has DevOps changed QA forever? Is there still a place for dedicated QA teams in an automated world?
🚀 How did Checkly evolve into a PLG company with a sales team?
⚙️ How do they run customer code at scale across 21 global data centers?
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/108-hannes-lenke-ceo-co-founder-checkly
Brought to you by SmartRecruiters -https://link.alphalist.com/smartrecruiters.
Get 10% off when mention the alphalist CTO podcast
Grow the business, not the headcount with insights from Tuomas Artman (CTO of Linear). Saying no to hypergrowth helped Linear succeed, but how did they do it? How did they build a high-quality product with a smaller team?
Listen to find out:
- How to achieve quality products without increasing headcount 🌱
- Avoiding feature bloat: The pitfalls of customer-driven development ⚖️
- Why you should build for longevity, not acquisition: The downsides of selling too early 🏛
- Why they raised funds after initially planning to bootstrap 💰
- Why Full-Stack Engineers are in 👍, and QA Teams are out 👎
- Why Linear avoids automated UI tests 🚦
- How a local-first synchronization engine ensures a smooth UX ⚙️
Discover new ways to do things with Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, who is working to deprecate backend development using their experience with 150 independent dev teams running a collection of 5,000 microservices. Yet this podcast is more than that (although I was blown away by the demo)—expect great nuggets of wisdom on meritocracy, data, and of course, backend. Think of this podcast as a series of back-to-back nuggets of wisdom that not only help you make sense of what you've observed but also open your mind to emerging trends.
Listen to find out
👨🍳 How French Restaurants Inspired Engineer-led Sales
⚖️ Finding Success in Contradicting Ideas
🧑💻 The Two Types of Engineers: Artists 🎨 vs. Hackers 🔧
🏗️ How he is working on deprecating backend development
📊 Why data is only as good as the decisions it guides and actualizes
📚 The Power of Ontologies
🧩 Inductive vs. Deductive Reasoning
🌈 Diversity in meritocracy through acts of rebellion 💥
ℹ️ Why you need to reduce information asymmetry
+🤖 Like Analog to Digital: How LLMs will change things
Find out how to build trust and accountability in a fully remote team in this CTO podcast featuring Sabrina Farmer, CTO @ GitLab. You will also hear how Sabrina draws on her experience in AI, DevSecOps, and her 19 years at Google to rethink the developer experience.
Listen to find out:
- How Gitlab's CEO Challenge encourages developers to innovate and automate away historic challenges (e.g. Log4js)
= Why DevOps is just problem-solving 🕵️♀️ at all levels of the stack
- How to use AI to create teaching moments 💡 in the developer workflow
- How GitLab onboards quicker with detailed documentation📝 (no tribal knowledge)
Discover the benefits of end-to-end technical independence with Alexander Matthey, CTO of Adyen.
Learn why Adyen cherishes its in-house strategy as Alexander shares how Adyen’s extreme technical independence (no third-party vendors) enables efficiency in everything from libraries to security.
Listen to find out:
- Security First: How Adyen makes security a priority for everyone. 🔒
- Pick Up the Phone📞: How direct communication makes them more efficient.
- How Adyen’s long-term vision drives innovation. 🚀
- How Conway’s Law is applied to their team structure
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/104-alexander-matthey-cto-adyen?utm_source=feed&utm_medium=referral
Explore the evolution of both a product and the role of its co-founder in this CTO podcast featuring David Cramer (co-founder + CPO @ Sentry). You will discover the pros and cons of each stage in Sentry's journey (open source -> bootstrap -> VC) and why David's role evolved (CEO -> CTO -> CPO).
Listen to find out
🔄 Why his role has evolved: CEO -> CTO -> CPO
🧑💻 DevTool Marketing 101: Inspiration, Attention, and Conversation
💰 How to monetize open source
🎨 How good branding and design can make an "unsexy" product cool
💳 The power of the self-serve model and its impact on sales
👥 Solopreneur vs. small team with friends
⚖️ Does work-life balance exist in tech?
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/103-david-cramer-co-founder-cpo-sentry
Discover how to leverage platform engineering 🏗️ for convenience, standardization, automation, and reduced cloud costs in this CTO podcast featuring Boyan Dimitrov (CTO @ SIXT). SIXT is a leading global mobility provider serving customers in over 100 countries worldwide. With 800 tech employees globally, they have spent the past eight years standardizing and modularizing their tech stack to achieve unparalleled scalability.
Listen to find out:
- How to apply the 80:20 rule to Platform ⚖️
- How to automate 🔄infrastructure without tickets 🎟️
- How to reduce cloud costs ☁️with Platform Engineering
- How to evaluate ⚖️ an IDP
- Why they standardize hosting (cloud and database) 🗄️
- Open Souce vs. Proprietary - Build vs. Buy
Listen here - https://alphalist.com/podcast/102-boyan-dimitrov-cto-sixt
Brought to you by Storyblok (https://link.alphalist.com/storyblok_podcast)
Get ready for the AI industrial revolution 🦸 in this CTO podcast episode featuring a roundtable of AI AllStars!
So much is happening in AI, and you want to be part of it - that is why we asked
Jonas Andrulis (Founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha), Rasmus Rothe (Co-founder of Merantix and its AI Campus) and Johannes Schaback (CTO of SumUp) to share with us a broad overview of what CTOs need to know about upcoming AI revolution. Turns out, we aren’t waiting for AGI - we are working on Transformative AI which is in reach for us all. Ready to transform lives with AI?
Listen to find out:
- ~~AGI~~ Transformative AI by 2030 🤖
- Why your AI strategy (USP💎) matters more than model choice
- How to balance AI R&D 🎓with Product 💥and Enterprise Sales 💸
- AI Models: Build⚒️/Buy🛒/Pivot 🧭
- What are emerging opportunities in AI? (Spoiler: B2B SaaS especially in manufacturing 🏭)
- How to champion AI 🦸 in your company
- Loonshots🚀: how to cultivate innovation
- + Hack to attract 🧲 AI talent to non-tech hubs
Listen here - https://alphalist.com/podcast/101-ai-revolution-roundtable-feat-jonas-andruilis-aleph-alpha-rasmus-rothe-merantix-johannes-schabak-sumup
Brought to you by Storyblok (https://link.alphalist.com/storyblok_podcast)
Trust your intuition, you will gain a lot from this CTO podcast featuring Jason Fried, co-founder and CEO of 37signals, a company known for having groundbreaking policies and products (Basecamp, HEY, Once, etc.). He is also a bootstrapping hero and author of multiple books (Getting Real, REWORK, REMOTE, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work).
Listen to find out:
- Intuitive🔮 over ‘data-driven’ 🔢decision making
- Hook 🪝 vs Towel Rail 🎏: The Power of Simple, Versatile Products
- CEO-CTO Relationship: How to counteract the negativity brought on by the typical push-pull 🕹️
- Why they do Customer interviews post-launch
- Take-home assessments at 37Signals: paid and overloaded 🪨
+ Bezos’ shares in 37Signals
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/100-jason-fried-co-founder-ceo-37signals
Lead a more humane and effective organisation with inspiration from Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies. Inspired by system design💠, cybernetics🤖 and neuroscience 🧠, Team Topologies allows CTOs to structure their teams in a more humane way that reduces cognitive load 🤯 while increasing user value 🎯.
Listen to find out:
- Value Flow💦: What, why and how to find it
- Team Topologies🪢: The 3 team types,1 grouping, and 3 interaction modes
- Why Continuous Stewardship 🛞 is important in software
- Decoupling🧩 in Time: Amazon’s Secret Source
+Why Team Topologies is like Pilates 🏋️ for your company goals🦸
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/99-matthew-skelton-co-author-of-team-topologies
Embrace the Site Reliability Mindset with Alex Ewerlöf, Sr. Staff Engineer @ Volvo Cars 🚗 and SRE thought leader. Understand how the different aspects of site reliability work together 🪢 and when you need a DevOps vs. Platform Team vs. SRE. Find out how to set your own Service Level Indicators (SLI), Service Level Objectives (SLO), and Service Level Agreements (SLA), as laid out by the creator of the Service Level Calculator.
Listen to find out:
- SRE 👷 vs. DevOps ⚒️ vs. Platform Engineering🏗️
- Service Level 101: How to set SLIs🚦, SLOs 🎯and SLAs 🤝
- Washing Machine 🧺🫧 vs. Laundry Room🫧🏘️: The Challenges of Standardization
- OnCall🎧⚠️: Centralised vs. Team-based?
+ The unique software challenges of the automotive industry.
Listen online: https://alphalist.com/podcast/98-alex-ewerlof-sr-staff-engineer-volvo-cars
Read Alex's Website: https://alexewerlof.com.
40% off his book with this coupon code: https://blog.alexewerlof.com/alphalist.
This episode was sponsored by DoiT.
1Let’s become better Multipliers ✖️ in this CTO Podcast featuring Pat Kua, former CTO of N26 who by popular request now helps CTOs Level Up themselves and their teams. As a sought-after expert in helping ICs transition to leadership roles, Pat shares leadership gems with CTOs.
Listen to find out:
- Why you should fly high 🕊️and dive deep 🤿
- Why even ICs need leadership skills 🧑💻
- Maker⚒️ to Multiplier🌬️: What you need to unlearn when you move into management.
- How to communicate: CRY Principle, Translate into Foreign Tongue 💬.. And TCP vs UDP Communication
+ What the long German Hiring Cycles mean for CTOs
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/97-pat-kua-cto-coach-and-founder-of-the-tech-lead-academy
Discover the power of radical transparency🧐 with Charles Gorintin, CTO of Alan (a French InsurTech) and founding force behind Mistral. He may work in a regulated space, but there is nothing typical about Alan’s setup when it comes to internal matters.
Public Salary Framework ✅Searchable Board Meetings ✅4 Managers for 90 FTE✅
Listen to find out:
- Why the Manager Role is split into Leads🧑💻 and Coaches 🪔
- How Transparent Compensation 💸works with public Salary Levels and Performance Reviews
- How he hires 🤝: talent density, culture add and more specialized than him
- Why he saw the need for Mistral 🇪🇺
- + How they leverage GitHub Discussions for public decision-making, ownership, and Chesterton’s Fence
Brought to you by Instaffo and DoiT
Become a better CTO/CPTO with these insights from David Gebhardt, CTO (and former CPTO) of mobile.de (Germany’s largest car vehicle marketplace). Originally the Head of Tech, David evolved into CPTO, eventually leading the 400-strong Product +Tech teams before evolving business needs led him to bring on a CPO and go back to being ‘just’ the CTO (“only” 250 people). He shares why in this great CTO podcast.
Listen to find out:
- Why he went from CTO to CTPO and back 🤔
- Self-Efficacy as CTO ✅: How to be effective and FEEL effective
- Where innovation 💡 comes from (+ mobile.de’s Innovation Days Format)
+ Why PHP isn’t all that bad
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/95-david-gebhardt-cto-mobilede
Brought to you by Instaffo - https://instaffo.com/cto
Let’s hack cybersecurity in 2024 with Melanie Rieback, Co-founder & CEO of Radically Open Security, the world’s first not-for-profit cybersecurity consultancy with a focus on PenTesting🔏.
Melanie is on a mission to fix cybersecurity consulting by putting people before profits and empowering internal teams “how to fish” 🎣.
Tune in to hear about the current cybersecurity landscape from the person who not only authored a viral RFID paper (“Is Your Cat Infected with a Computer Virus?”), but also PenTested Tor, Homebrew and Greenpeace.
Listen to find out:
- What is the business model💸 behind Post Growth Entrepreneurship (90% of profits go towards Open Internet Initiatives via NLNet)
- What to prioritise 🕵️♀️ in realistic internal IT policies (passwords, backups, updates..)
- Internal vs. External Security Teams
+ Why she uses “Forgot My Password” as a “magic link” to access infrequent sites (and doesn’t remember the password on purpose)
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/94-melanie-rieback-co-founder-ceo-at-radically-open-security
Embrace the technical side 🔧 of the CTO role with Allan Leinwand, CTO of Webflow 🖱️ who has combined technical know-how with great products on every layer of the OSI Model: from setting up HP’s first ethernet, CISCO’s early networks, building the world’s first CDN at Digital Island, and continuing up the stack to enterprise cloud ☁️ (ServiceNow), social gaming 🎮 (zynga), communications 💬 (Slack), eCommerce 🛒 (Shopify) and now webdesign 🎨(Webflow).
Listen to find out;
- Why deep technical knowledge 🧠 allows better products
- How a monolith can combine individual code ownership and great deploy times 🤔
- How to attract 🧲 talent with a ‘boring’ stack (+ Innovation Lab 101)
- How to embrace the role of a pre-IPO CTO 🧑🚀🚀
- How to stay technical as a CTO 🧑💻
- Why he ships small fixes from their #UX-Papercut channel
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/93-allan-leinwand-cto-webflow
BROUGHT TO YOU BY: WorkGenius (https://link.alphalist.com/work) and codecentric (https://link.alphalist.com/cc)
Want to become a better manager? Then manage yourself better!
From managing the time you spend managing, and all the way to managing how you give your team new tasks...
Let's get real with Johanna Rothman, whom they don’t call the Pragmatic Manager for nothing. You will love her straight-talking approach to management. After almost 40 years in management, she can boil down things to sharp principles that will make you either hand pump💯, shoot the link to your buddy🤣… or smile sheepishly🫣. Yip, she got you. (Don’t worry, we won’t judge. Patterns exist because everyone does them. Which is why we need people who have been around the block to call us out 📢on them).
Listen to find out:
- Why you need to manage yourself to better manage others
- Micromanagement: A recipe for multitasking chaos🤯 and WIP overload.
- Why Gantt Charts are bad👎. Use Flow Metrics and PERT instead.
- Who actually needs to be in the C-Suite (HINT: Not 25 people 🤣)
- + how things have changed since the 70s: from the CTO Role to Feedback loops.
Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/92-johanna-rothman-the-pragmatic-manager
BROUGHT TO YOU BY: WorkGenius (https://link.alphalist.com/work) and codecentric (https://link.alphalist.com/cc)
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A great show, my favourite so far. Lots of nuggets for eng managers.