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

Navigating the Rollercoaster: From Rapid Growth to Unwinding with Tracie Hlavka

·34 min·2 clips

Tracie says layoffs are “devastating” because they affect people’s lives, not just org charts.

1. The CTO Podcast episode follows Tracie Hlavka, former CTO of Flyhomes, through rapid scaling, layoffs, and career reset. 2. Etienne de Bruin interviews Tracie Hlavka, who was former CTO of Flyhomes and is now looking for a job. 3. The episode asks what a CTO does when a company grows from 10 engineers to 60 and then has to shrink again. 4. Tracie says the job market is “not a booming market” and calls series B and C startups her sweet spot. 5. She says her departure from Flyhomes was a mutual decision after “a series of rifts” as the company got smaller. 6. Etienne connects that change to the CTO Levels framework, where complexity rises with headcount and budgets. 7. Tracie says rapid scaling feels fun to her because adding people can solve problems quickly. 8. She says Flyhomes grew from 10 engineers to 60 in about a year and had to hire in the right order. 9. She says a full real estate brokerage, mortgage company, title company, and escrow company were all being supported. 10. She says hiring was intense in 2021 and that waiting two weeks for interviews and offers could lose a candidate. 11. She estimates it took about 10 interviews per hire and roughly 100 applicants to get one employee. 12. Tracie says some areas needed new bodies because the business had never built product there, including DevOps and security. 13. She says infrastructure work was fine for a series A company but not for a company expecting to grow quickly and potentially go public in two or three years. 14. She says hiring people is inefficient in the short term because every new developer must learn systems, people, and the business. 15. She recommends “move the work, not the people” because constant reorganizations break team relationships. 16. She says the org should be flexible to the business, but not shifted around every three months. 17. The conversation is practical and reflective, with Etienne pushing on tradeoffs and Tracie answering with concrete examples from Flyhomes. 18. The pacing stays conversational, with repeated examples about hiring, team design, layoffs, and product roadmaps. 19. People leading engineering teams through growth or shrinkage would get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting startup inspiration without management detail may want to skip it.

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