Insights & Strategies for Chief Technology Officers Navigating the C-Suite while Balancing Technical Strategy, Team Management, & Innovation
235 episodes listed below
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The CTO Podcast explores the worlds of Chief Technical officers as they manage the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of technologists in the C-suite. Hosted by Etienne de Bruin, founder of 7CTOs and author of CTO Excellence in 100 Days: Becoming the leader your company deserves. www.ctopod.com
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Etienne de Bruin connects engineering choices to the organizational and commercial judgments that shape technology companies.
Etienne de Bruin treats technology leadership as an operating problem with commercial consequences. His interviews connect engineering practice to hiring, product delivery, organizational complexity, and company-building.
A feature flag becomes a test of customer patience, and suddenly your rollout plan needs a second look.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded AI conversation that puts system design ahead of model hype.
Ksenia Palky treats AI less like a grand promise than a system under strain. As Director of AI at Airspace, she keeps the focus on time-critical shipments, from a kidney and an airplane part to other mission-critical products. That narrower lens works.
Purpose is framed as action, influence, and impact inside real institutions.
Nell treats purpose as something practiced, not preached, and Etienne keeps the conversation tied to the practical problem of leading when overthinking slows action.
Reliability is framed as a product choice, with cost, features, and risk kept in balance.
It treats reliability as a product choice, not a housekeeping chore. Adam Barrett makes the case that time to reliability can matter more than time to market, and he does so in plain business terms: cost, features, and risk.
A practical take on outcomes, metrics, and the management tradeoffs behind measuring engineering work.
The conversation treats engineering metrics as a management problem, not a reporting exercise. After the RV opener, it gets into the awkward question of what a developer's time actually buys, and how to measure that without kidding yourself.
A practical look at turning podcast planning into a repeatable editorial system.
Joel Beasley and Etienne de Bruin spend most of the episode on the practical work behind a podcast: choosing an audience, deciding what deserves attention, and keeping an editorial rhythm that can repeat week after week.
A loose, useful talk about how CTO judgment gets learned over time.
Kevin Goldsmith's conversation with Etienne de Bruin keeps its attention on CTO judgment, context, and the fact that leadership is usually messier than any tidy playbook.
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.
A practical look at how AI is pushing CTOs to move planning upstream.
It argues that AI-assisted coding is changing how SDLCs are judged, especially for CTOs thinking about software design, steady improvement, technical debt, and refactoring.
A new news format sets up the conversation.
Etienne de Bruin opens with Ksenia Palky and the CTO Podcast.
Dr.
Etienne de Bruin talks with Joel Beasley about how to start, grow, manage, and scale a podcast.
Etienne de Bruin opens the episode with Liquid, a book about complexity in modern technology organizations.
Etienne de Bruin sits down with Cathy Keating.
Dave Atzit opens with the kind of origin story engineers swap when they realize they started on the same unusual computer.
Etienne de Bruin speaks with Elisa Carpio, Director of Product Management, Data Platform at JLL Technologies.
Etienne de Bruin brings Sharon, Lina, and Ksenia into one AI-heavy conversation.
The episode opens with a weekend RV story.
Lina Sklyarova-Mordvinova joins Etienne de Bruin for a conversation that begins with her journey from Ukraine and the Ukrainian Space Research Institute.
Etienne de Bruin sits down with Maria Flynn, founder and CEO of Ambiologics, for a conversation that moves through entrepreneurship, leadership, and the tough question of what happens next.
It opens with a casual green-juice check-in, then settles into the larger question of purpose.
Alex Balazs is in the CTO seat, with Etienne de Bruin steering the conversation through friendship, vulnerability in the C-suite, generative AI, and the awkward math of time when everyone wants access.
The CTO Podcast episode pairs Etienne de Bruin with Alan Stewart, lead engineer at SyncedUp, to connect Lord of the Rings, Conway’s Law, and software quality.
The CTO Podcast episode with Zayna Rose centers on “profitable leadership presence,” a framework she defines as intentional authenticity plus image intelligence for personal and professional settings.
Etienne de Bruin opens with Kevin Goldsmith and a quick joke about standing while working before getting to the real topic.
Ryan Kari, CTO of Mechanica, explains how a torque sensor company grew out of Formula One, starting with Ivan Garchelis and a Ford Formula One racing team.
Etienne de Bruin speaks with Del Kronenwitter, Director of Technology at Fuse Integration, about airborne communication, encryption, and AI inside a highly regulated defense environment.
Stefan Schmidt and the host cover Amazon’s return-to-office policy, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise launch, a Pew Research survey on AI job fears, and Amazon’s shutdown of Honeycode.
Tracie Hlavka, former CTO of Flyhomes, describes growing an engineering team from 10 to 60 in about a year and why that kind of scale changes the CTO job.
Matt Van Itallie, founder and CEO of SEMA, explains why his company builds software that helps engineering leaders manage Gen AI in the SDLC and explain codebases to non-technical executives.
Jennifer Cwagenberg, head of engineering at Protopia and former engineer at Match.com, SolarWinds, and Toyota, explains how her career moved from telecom and ETL work to AI data protection.
Sean Nam, CTO of Ivy Energy, says fundraising changed his job from writing software to managing investor expectations, AI risk, open-source licensing, and the realities of selling a future vision.
Etienne de Bruin speaks with Krijn Van der Raadt, an experienced CTO who led technology at GreatCall, AppFolio, and MindTouch before moving into fractional CTO and coaching work.
Host Etienne de Bruin interviews CTO coach Stefan Schmidt about how AI is reshaping the role of CTOs and software development.
CTO Steven Zgaljic shares the personal story of his daughter's mysterious illness, which led him to build an AI-powered health tracking system using N8n, Superbase, and Slack.
Etienne de Bruin opens the conversation with Adam and goes straight to reliability.
CTO coach Stefan Schmidt joins the show to discuss why a lack of clear vision and strategy is at the root of many tech leadership problems, from framework debates to team misalignment.
The conversation looks at how AI-assisted coding is changing the software development lifecycle.