Great technical leadership requires more than just great coding skills. It requires a variety of other skills that are not well-defined, and they are not something that we can fully learn in any school or book. Hear from experienced technical leaders sharing their journey and philosophy for building great technical teams and achieving technical excellence. Find out what makes them great and how to apply those lessons to your work and team.
Does moving faster with AI mean you get to skip the laws that governed every software project before it? Milan Milanovic argues the opposite, the old laws of software engineering now apply twice as hard. In this episode, Milan Milanovic, CTO and author of Laws of Software Engineering, returns to unpack why the laws that have quietly governed software projects for decades are more relevant than…
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Is vibe coding quietly draining the thing that makes teams effective: their shared understanding? Margaret breaks down her new “triple debt” model, and why cognitive debt might be the one nobody’s tracking. In this episode, Margaret-Anne Storey, co-author of the SPACE framework and a leading developer experience researcher, returns three years after her first appearance to unpack her new “triple…
If expertise is becoming almost free, why is judgment becoming the most expensive skill in tech? Ajey Gore, former Gojek CTO, explains why the age of AI agents rewards builders over typists. In this episode, Ajey Gore, former Group CTO of Gojek and Operating Partner at Peak XV Partners, explains why coding agents are forcing software teams to rethink what “correct” really means. He argues that as…
What if optimizing for AI output is actually slowing your company down? When code becomes nearly free to produce, the organizations still measuring productivity by output are solving the wrong problem. In this episode, Mik Kersten, author of “Project to Product” and the forthcoming “Output to Outcome,” shares why the real challenge of the AI era isn’t generating more code — it’s building…
Why do 70% of change efforts fail — even when leadership is fully committed? The answer isn’t strategy or resources; it’s the hidden stories people unknowingly carry that silently block every initiative. In this episode, Ronica Roth, author of “Practice Makes Culture” and co-founder of The Welcome Elephant, shares a practical framework for creating lasting organizational change. Drawing on 25…
What if your AI coding agent is quietly cheating on your tests — and how do you stop it? Julien Verlaguet, who built the type system Meta used to migrate tens of millions of PHP lines, is now building Skipper: a closed-loop coding agent designed to make AI-generated code verifiably correct, without human intervention. In this episode, Julien Verlaguet, creator of the Hack programming language at…
Why do companies with the best intentions end up betraying their customers, employees, and mission? Eric Ries calls it “financial gravity” — an invisible force that pulls even the most principled companies toward corruption, and understanding it is the first step to resisting it. In this episode, Eric Ries, entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, shares why building a great…
What if faster coding is actually slowing your software delivery down? Most teams are pouring AI into the coding phase, but the real bottleneck is everywhere else. In this episode, Andrew Haschka, Field CTO at GitLab for Asia Pacific and Japan, explains why most AI strategies in software engineering are failing and what it takes to fix them. He introduces the AI paradox: teams invest heavily in…
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