The CTO Playbook

Adam Horner
  • 5.0 (7)
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

Join Adam Horner, a CTO with over 30 years in the tech industry, on The CTO Playbook — the podcast dedicated to helping CTOs excel. Perfect for CTOs and tech leaders navigating the complexities of their roles, each episode offers clear insights, innovative strategies, and practical advice from top leaders in tech. With Adam’s extensive experience mentoring engineers and tech leaders, and over a decade as a CTO, you’ll gain the tools and knowledge to build and refine your own CTO playbook. Whether you're tackling complex projects, fostering innovation, leading teams, or shaping your company's tech strategy, this podcast is your go-to resource. Adam’s journey from engineer to strategic CTO was challenging. He learned through the school of hard knocks, making avoidable mistakes and facing countless challenges. Often out of his comfort zone and wishing for more guidance, he created this podcast to provide the support and advice he once lacked. Tune in for engaging interviews, leadership tips, and the latest in technology strategy. Each episode is designed to help you lead with confidence and level up as a CTO. Listen now to start your journey with The CTO Playbook and build your own playbook to excel in your role.

  1. 5D AGO

    82: Are You Running Fast in the Wrong Direction? A CTO’s Guide to Clarity with Jason McGhee

    Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Are you running faster with AI, or just running blind? Most teams don’t lack data, they lack understanding. Today, I sit down with CTO Jason McGhee, who has spent years inside analytics, machine learning, and product teams asking the hard question: why is the data changing? AI in analytics works best when it supports human judgment instead of replacing it. A hybrid approach keeps people involved while AI assists with complex tasks, making decisions clearer and systems easier to reason about. Moving faster with AI increases risk when teams cannot explain why the data is changing. Both recurring reports and one-off investigations break down without context. Dashboards often fail as real deliverables because they separate numbers from explanation. Insight becomes more actionable when it is shared alongside the data itself. Screenshots, slide decks, and disconnected tools add friction, making validation harder and discouraging deeper questions from leaders. If you care about data-driven decision making, want a more honest relationship with machine learning outputs, or are figuring out how generative AI fits into real-world business analytics, this conversation sharpens how you think about data, trust, and momentum as a technology leader. You’ll Learn: [00:00] Introduction [02:45] Why more data doesn’t help if you can’t explain what changed [05:12] How keeping humans in the loop changes AI analytics failure modes [09:48] Why dashboards break down once they leave the builder’s hands [14:32] How AI turns big analytical questions into auditable steps [20:41] Why one-off and recurring reports need shared intuition to work [27:18] How screenshots and slide decks quietly block data validation [34:55] Why faster AI increases the risk of running in the wrong direction [43:07] How mixing structured data with Slack adds missing business context [57:26] The leadership cost of treating analytics as outputs, not understanding For more information you can also visit writ.so. You can connect with Jason on his personal LinkedIn or his business LinkedIn. Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and check out Adam's CTO coaching company here.

    1h 10m

  2. FEB 3

    81: The Culture Playbook for High-Performing Engineering Teams — with CTO Pasha Jam

    Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. What if the strongest part of your engineering organization isn’t your tech stack, but the culture you protect every day?  In this episode, I’m joined by CTO Pasha Jam, who has grown an engineering team from three people to 110, expanded internationally, and navigated company acquisitions while keeping culture a central focus. We define what a healthy engineering culture looks like, and why it consistently outperforms strategy and process. Culture became a priority after working in environments that were difficult to enjoy, even when the products and compensation were strong. Psychological safety is explored through the lens of engineering teams, including the ability to ask questions, raise risks, challenge decisions, and fail without fear. Culture’s impact on hiring, onboarding, and communication across teams in multiple countries is explored, along with why people who leave often say they miss the culture and sometimes choose to return. If you’re responsible for engineering teams and want to think more intentionally about culture, leadership, and long-term team health, this episode offers practical perspective grounded in lived experience. You’ll Learn: [00:00] Introduction [05:18] Why job dissatisfaction often traces back to culture instead of pay or products [06:42] What psychological safety looks like when engineers challenge decisions without fear [11:07] How empowerment leads teams to take ownership without being pushed [24:21] Why fixing incidents together matters more than assigning blame [28:36] How putting people before process changes commitment and delivery [30:14] Why micromanagement quietly erodes trust and culture [33:09] What it looks like when leaders carry culture forward without seeking credit [35:27] Why culture must evolve as teams scale and contexts change Resources Mentioned: Agile Manifesto | Website Need car repairs but not the upfront cash? If you're in the UK, get approved in seconds and pay interest‑free over time, apply with Bumper today and stay on the road. You can connect with Pasha Jam on his Linkedin Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and check out Adam's CTO coaching company here.

    38 min

  3. JAN 27

    80: Gut Instinct in Tech Leadership: When to Trust It, When to Challenge It

    Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Your most powerful decision engine isn’t your data, your dashboards, or your AI, it’s your gut. There is a topic that most technical leaders quietly wrestle with: gut instinct. Not as mysticism. Not as guesswork. But as a real decision-making tool for modern CTO leadership. This episode is all about why your instincts are often your experience compressed into a feeling, when you should trust that signal, and when you absolutely shouldn’t. You’ll hear real coaching stories from seasoned CTOs navigating technical leadership, roadmap trade-offs, scaling engineering teams, and high-stakes calls where the data wasn’t enough.  We’ll talk about how engineering leadership changes when you treat instinct like a cached function, fast, powerful, but sometimes stale, and how to validate it without killing its speed. This episode is for startup and enterprise technology leaders who want sharper judgment, fewer regret-filled postmortems, and more confidence saying, “Something about this feels off, and here’s why.” If you’ve ever ignored your gut and paid for it later, or trusted it blindly and been burned, this conversation will give you a practical way forward. It’s about building better instincts, not just better systems. You’ll Learn: [00:00] Introduction [01:02] Why seasoned CTOs sense problems before they can explain them [03:18] How ignoring gut signals leads to overcommitment and roadmap failure [05:07] What gut instinct really is — experience compressed into a signal [07:26] When instinct fails in new or emotionally charged situations [09:41] How to spot where your instincts are strong, weak, or distorted [12:12] Treating instinct like a cached function — fast but fallible [16:34] Using gut instinct as a warning without turning it into dogma [20:18] How data can validate instinct without slowing decisions [24:47] A playbook for sharpening instinct under pressure Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and check out Adam's CTO coaching company here.

    29 min

  4. JAN 20

    79: What Engineers Really Need from Their Leaders: A Conversation with Massimo Belloni

    Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Most CTOs fail not because of bad decisions, but because they stop asking why.  In this episode, I sit down with Massimo Belloni, Head of Machine Learning and Data Science at Docplanner, to discuss what real technical leadership looks like when the answers aren’t obvious. We dig into bold CTO leadership, why engineering leadership is mostly about people, and how curiosity in leadership builds trust faster than authority ever will. Massimo shares hard-earned lessons from leading ML teams across industries, and why the job isn’t about being the smartest person in the room, but creating conditions where teams thrive. If you’re navigating CTO mindset shifts, managing high-performing engineering teams, or feeling the quiet weight of imposter syndrome in tech leadership, this conversation will land. We talk about invisible leadership work, asking better questions, and why progress only makes sense in hindsight. Iif you’re leading through complexity and change, this episode is your reminder: certainty isn’t the goal, clarity is. You’ll Learn: [00:00] Introduction [02:14] How Massimo realized leadership is about people, not technical mastery [05:48] Why trying to be the smartest person in the room backfires [09:37] What changes when you lead systems you don’t fully understand [13:22] Why most leadership problems aren’t actually technical [17:54] How asking why builds trust faster than giving answers [22:41] Why strong teams come from safety, not fearlessness [27:36] How invisible leadership work compounds over time [33:18] The question Massimo uses to measure leadership progress [38:47] Why leadership only makes sense in hindsight Resources Mentioned: The CTO Playbook episode on The Key Relationship That Drives Startup Growth with Steven Renwick | Spotify or Apple Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech | YouTube You can connect with Massimo on LinkedIn and learn more about his work on his substack here. Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and check out Adam's CTO coaching company here.

    44 min

  5. JAN 13

    78: The Hidden Cost of Getting Paid: Why Trust Is a CTO’s Blind Spot

    Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. The real reason invoices don’t get paid has nothing to do with accounting.  Late payments aren’t just annoying, they quietly drain focus, energy, and leadership bandwidth. In this episode I sit down with entrepreneur Maximiliaan van Kuyk to discuss why trust in business payments is breaking down, and what CTOs can do about it. Drawing on years of experience across startups, agencies, and global markets, Maximiliaan explains why accounts receivable is no longer just a finance function, but a leadership and systems problem. They explore how late invoice payments persist not because people are malicious, but because incentives are misaligned, and accountability is invisible. You’ll hear why consistency beats confrontation, how social accountability in business can outperform legal threats, and why CTOs should care deeply about cash flow management even if they never touch invoicing. If you’ve ever felt the quiet frustration of waiting to get paid, or watched payment delays impact runway, morale, or growth, this conversation will reshape how you think about trust systems, AI in accounts receivable, and the future of getting paid on time. You’ll Learn: [00:00] Introduction [02:18] Why getting paid is really a trust problem, not a money problem [06:41] How chasing payments drains founders emotionally and why it usually lands leadership [10:52] What happens when small businesses become accidental lenders, and why the system works against them [15:37] Why consistent follow-ups beat confrontation and legal threats when recovering unpaid invoices [21:04] Why late payments persist even with contracts and how incentives shape behavior [27:56] How social accountability changes payment behavior faster than reminders or credit scores [34:48] Why reputation only works when it’s visible, and what hidden payment history enables [41:22] Why CTOs need to understand cash flow risk even if they never touch invoicing [48:09] How tracking payment behavior could reshape trust, partnerships, and who gets hired You can connect with Maximiliaan on Instagram or find his work on his website here. Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and check out Adam's CTO coaching company here.

    55 min

  6. JAN 6

    77: The CTO Guide to Scaling Operational Maturity — Lessons from Amazon to Startups

    Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. What if the biggest challenge in scaling your organization isn’t execution, but knowing where you actually are? In this episode, I sit down with James Webster, former Amazon engineer and founder of Sheep CRM, to unpack a deceptively simple idea that cuts through years of confusion around operational maturity. James introduces his Three Mountains model, a practical way for CTOs to assess reality without ego, optimism, or wishful thinking. We talk about what CTO leadership really looks like during hypergrowth, why engineering leadership breaks when teams skip stages, and how misaligned expectations quietly derail even strong organizations. Drawing from James’s experience inside Amazon and years working with scaling teams, we explore why clarity beats speed, and why naming constraints honestly is a leadership advantage, not a liability. If you’re navigating startup scaling, leading teams through change, or trying to align technology with business reality, this conversation will help you reset your internal compass. This episode is about perspective, precision, and building from where you are, not where you wish you were. You’ll Learn: [00:00] Introduction [01:08] Why scaling fails when leaders misread where they actually are [02:21] How Amazon hypergrowth reshaped James Webster’s view of pace and pressure [03:37] Why constant role change breaks traditional playbooks [14:26] Why thinking too far ahead undermines real transformation [41:12] How repeated problems signal when process really matters [42:18] Why “sloppy” processes beat perfection early on [43:34] How optimism bias keeps leaders from seeing reality [47:09] Why losing your position on the map becomes dangerous at speed [48:22] How choosing the right problem changes everything You can connect with James on LinkedIn and learn more about his work on his website here. Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and check out Adam's CTO coaching company here.

    54 min

  7. 12/30/2025

    76: How Great CTOs Influence Regulators, Auditors, and Certifications

    Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. What if the real blocker in your certification isn’t the rules at all, but how you’re playing the game?  What really happens when you treat compliance like a fixed checklist and then get hit with yet another vague delay? I take you into the moment a CTO realized that being technically right still left him carrying months of uncertainty on his shoulders. That crack in his old mental model opened the door to seeing regulation as a human system shaped by people instead of boxes to tick. The same compliance posture can lead to totally different timelines depending on relationships, incentives, and how you show up in the room. Instead of obsessing over perfection, the focus shifts to mapping the people in the process and asking sharper questions that actually move things forward. By the end of this episode, you’ll see how small moves of influence can change a certification journey that once felt completely out of your hands. You’ll Learn: [00:00] Introduction [01:12] Why the real certification roadblock is rarely the checklist [03:56] What changes when you treat compliance as a human system instead of binary rules [05:22] The question that flips frustration into influence and momentum [07:18] How a single shift in communication makes leadership lean in [08:42] The reason two identical compliance postures get wildly different timelines [09:31] How mapping people instead of tasks reveals hidden bottlenecks and unstuck paths [11:54] What a high-stakes UK implementation showed about friction-free compliance [14:38] Why aligned incentives accelerate timelines faster than documentation ever will [17:42] Where influence replaces waiting and CTOs move from reactive to strategic [18:22] Five steps that turn regulatory uncertainty into predictable progress Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and check out Adam's CTO coaching company here.

    25 min

  8. 12/23/2025

    75: The Hidden Systems Behind High-Performing Engineering Teams

    Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. What if your team's biggest problem isn't talent, it's the rules you've never written down?  In this episode, I'm talking with Gerald Chablowski, a lead developer based in Thailand whose journey from archaeology and history into tech leadership gives him a very human lens on engineering. I’m drawn to the way he thinks less about shiny tools and more about how people organize themselves, how rules get explained, and how work actually feels. His experience leading teams across different countries and cultures makes him obsessed with one question: what happens when we use structure to protect humans instead of control them. Too many engineering teams are playing a game where nobody can see the rulebook, then wondering why everything feels chaotic. Here we get brutally honest about what happens when goals change every week, when leaders “delegate” but still pull every string, and when trust gets treated like a slogan instead of something you earn in tiny daily moments. You’ll hear how simple constraints like clear rules, small pull requests, and real documentation can unlock creativity instead of killing it, especially in environments where people are scared to challenge the plan. You’ll Learn: [00:00] Introduction [03:48] Why tech only matters when it serves people, not the other way around [06:19] What happens when a team works without clear rules or shared understanding [09:14] The reason trust is built through tiny daily behavior, not speeches or titles [11:47] How unclear systems force developers into chaos even when rules technically exist [14:52] Why documentation becomes leverage when knowledge needs to outlive individuals [17:01] The leadership mistake that made a senior dev refuse to work with him [23:08] What learning hard physical skills teaches about leadership discomfort [28:19] How asking people to rewrite a task in their own words exposes hidden gaps fast [34:22] Why tiny pull requests transform code quality when systems enforce them [42:08] How relying on juniors teaches humility and system thinking faster than doing it all yourself You can connect with Gerald and his work on his LinkedIn. Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and check out Adam's CTO coaching company here.

    54 min
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5
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About

Join Adam Horner, a CTO with over 30 years in the tech industry, on The CTO Playbook — the podcast dedicated to helping CTOs excel. Perfect for CTOs and tech leaders navigating the complexities of their roles, each episode offers clear insights, innovative strategies, and practical advice from top leaders in tech. With Adam’s extensive experience mentoring engineers and tech leaders, and over a decade as a CTO, you’ll gain the tools and knowledge to build and refine your own CTO playbook. Whether you're tackling complex projects, fostering innovation, leading teams, or shaping your company's tech strategy, this podcast is your go-to resource. Adam’s journey from engineer to strategic CTO was challenging. He learned through the school of hard knocks, making avoidable mistakes and facing countless challenges. Often out of his comfort zone and wishing for more guidance, he created this podcast to provide the support and advice he once lacked. Tune in for engaging interviews, leadership tips, and the latest in technology strategy. Each episode is designed to help you lead with confidence and level up as a CTO. Listen now to start your journey with The CTO Playbook and build your own playbook to excel in your role.

Information

  • Creator
    Adam Horner
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    82
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2024-2025
  • Show Website
    The CTO Playbook

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