85: From Firefighting to Flow: How CTOs Build Teams That Learn Fast

7 snips

Mar 3, 2026

Bastien Duré, CTO at Inato — seasoned engineering leader building cloud products for clinical trials. He talks about balancing immediate fixes with learning, handling vendor outages and fragmented Android pain, and how pragmatic postmortems and psychological safety turn incidents into lasting team velocity. Practical, fast postmortems and preventative shifts are highlighted as keys to sustainable speed.

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ADVICE

Stem The Bleeding Before Deep Investigation

Stem the bleeding first with quick dirty fixes to protect customers during vendor outages or service-wide failures.
Then design failover or alternative distribution (e.g., serving JS bundles another way) and add vendor failover to prevent total downtime.

INSIGHT

Success Means Not Being The Bottleneck

Success as a CTO means systems work without you and teams can react when you're absent.
Design processes and forensics so people fix issues, implement fixes, and share learning while you can be on holiday.

ADVICE

Make Postmortems Produce Action

Run postmortems that pass the 'so what' test by producing at least one concrete action or explicit decision to do nothing.
Prefer shift-left countermeasures that prevent issues earlier in the value stream to reduce future costs.

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What if speed as a CTO has less to do with urgency and more to do with discipline?

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.

In this episode, I sit down with Bastien Duret, CTO at a French-American company building web-based products in the clinical trials space, to unpack what “moving fast” really means in complex technical environments.

As CTOs, we’re taught to value urgency. But when you’re debugging memory leaks across fragmented Android devices or responding to a vendor outage that brings your entire service down, speed starts to look different. The real question becomes when to stem the bleeding and when to slow down long enough to actually learn.

We get into what that shift looks like in practice, how leadership changes when problems become learning opportunities, how postmortems build long-term velocity, and why incident response reveals the true operating system of your team.

If you’re responsible for uptime, technical strategy, and building resilient teams, this episode will challenge how you think about speed, progress, and sustainable execution.

You’ll Learn:

[00:00] Introduction

[04:32] Why fragmented Android devices force you to rethink what quality really means

[06:48] How crash reports expose flawed assumptions you didn’t see

[08:21] The difference between fixing pain fast and learning from the mistake

[09:47] What to do when a vendor outage takes down your entire service

[11:18] The tension between contractual SLAs and your own uptime standards

[18:36] Why firefighting feels productive but fuels repeat failures

[28:14] How postmortems turn incidents into long-term acceleration

[39:52] The mindset shift from frantic execution to smooth acceleration

Clinical research shouldn’t be limited to a handful of sites. See how Inato helps sponsors reach more diverse patients, faster.

You can connect with Bastien on Linkedin

Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.