The CTO Podcast · Insights & Strategies for Chief Technology Officers Navigating the C-Suite while Balancing Technical Strategy, Team Management, & Innovation

Kathy Keating, Fractional CTO | Interim CTO | Executive Coach | CTO Levels™: Mastering Growth; Operational Excellence and Leadership Insights

·1 hr 1 min·3 clips

Cathy uses Annie Duke's Thinking in Bets to frame CTO decisions as facts plus luck.

Etienne de Bruin introduces Cathy Keating as a close friend and collaborator at Seven CTOs and on CTO Levels. He frames her as a fractional CTO, CTO advisor, executive coach, and the lead for the growth program for aspiring CTOs and startups. Cathy starts from a simple premise: technical organizations struggle when the work is not optimized and operationalized well. The conversation keeps coming back to that gap between work being done and work being made repeatable. They talk about mid-market scale-ups that need to deliver more quickly and effectively. Cathy describes how interim CTO work often means bridging a leadership transition while the company keeps moving. She and Etienne connect that role to product and engineering throughput. The episode also circles around the CTO Levels framework. That framework is used to assess team, process, and technology challenges and to help companies get unstuck. A big part of the discussion lands on documentation. Cathy is realistic about why SOPs and playbooks can feel like a bad idea to engineers. Still, she treats writing things down as useful when it helps execution and makes work easier to repeat. She also calls out the reluctance some developers have toward reading existing code. That reluctance matters because writing new code is easier than understanding what already exists. The conversation moves into founder behavior too. Cathy pushes back on the idea that a founder should skip the thinking and just hand a problem to a CTO. For her, a better conversation starts after the founder has already worked through the shape of the issue. By the end, the episode settles on a plain idea: leadership only helps if it makes the company easier to run.

As heard by us

A practical look at how scale-ups slow down when technical leadership stays reactive.

The CTO Podcast uses Cathy Keating to show how operational discipline shapes scale-up speed. Keating, a fractional and interim CTO and executive coach, connects the discussion to mid-market product engineering operations and the CTO Levels framework.

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Want a blunt look at why scale-up engineering slows down?

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