The CTO Playbook
Adam Horner
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.
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.
Episodes
Mentioned books
7 snips
Mar 24, 2026 • 17min
88: The CTO Role Has Changed — Why Doing More Isn’t the Answer
They unpack why success can make the CTO role feel heavier and why that weight signals a leadership shift. They introduce a navigation metaphor: orient before you accelerate. They explain how stacked pressures and collapsed credibility time change the nature of the work. They offer posture shifts and simple diagnostic questions to help leaders reframe and recalibrate.
12 snips
Mar 17, 2026 • 45min
87: AI Governance for CTOs: Turning AI Risk Into Competitive Advantage
Jill Heinze, AI foresight and strategy architect who builds responsible AI frameworks, discusses how unexamined assumptions create the biggest AI risk. She explains why the rush to be first causes blind spots. Short user research and anticipatory horizons reveal unseen harms and turn risk management into strategic advantage. Practical tactics for grounding vision, building foundations, and scaling with integrity are highlighted.
Mar 10, 2026 • 44min
86: Why Communication Is Now a Core Skill for CTOs and Senior Engineering Leaders
Kathleen Lucente, founder and CEO of Red Fan Communications and former IBM Research PR lead, helps technical leaders become trusted public authorities. She talks about why CTOs must think like business leaders and learn finance language. Short takes cover building C-suite trust, monitoring competitor visibility, and creating a scalable bench of technical communicators.
7 snips
Mar 3, 2026 • 48min
85: From Firefighting to Flow: How CTOs Build Teams That Learn Fast
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.
Feb 24, 2026 • 12min
84: Why Your Definition of Done Is Limiting Engineering’s Business Impact
A CTO coaching story reveals why busy engineering teams can still fail to move the business forward. A basketball analogy shows that merged code is not the same as scoring in production. The conversation covers symptoms of vague 'done', how limiting work in progress restores flow, and practical steps leaders can use to tie completion to real outcomes.
8 snips
Feb 17, 2026 • 48min
83: Are We Building the Right Things? A CTO’s Guide to Influence, Ethics, and Responsible Innovation
Joe Thompson, CTO at Hedgehog Lab and champion of design-led, ethical product development. He discusses starting with user research, how software can become people’s work environment, accessibility and exclusion in digital transformation, dark patterns and surveillance-funded models, and practical ways to raise ethical questions and align technology with values.
Feb 10, 2026 • 1h 10min
82: Are You Running Fast in the Wrong Direction? A CTO’s Guide to Clarity with Jason McGhee
Jason McGhee, CTO and co-founder of RIT with roots in software, ML, and analytics. He discusses hybrid analytics that keep humans in the loop. He explains why dashboards fail without context. He explores auditable AI workflows, cutting scope early, and balancing sprinting with measured learning. He warns how faster AI can increase the risk of running in the wrong direction.
30 snips
Feb 3, 2026 • 38min
81: The Culture Playbook for High-Performing Engineering Teams — with CTO Pasha Jam
Pasha Jam, CTO of Bumper who scaled engineering from a few people to 110 across countries, prioritizes people-first leadership. He discusses psychological safety, how culture beats tech for hiring and retention, practices that build camaraderie like blameless incident response and AMAs, and scaling culture across remote offices while avoiding micromanagement.
10 snips
Jan 27, 2026 • 29min
80: Gut Instinct in Tech Leadership: When to Trust It, When to Challenge It
They unpack gut instinct as experience compressed into quick pattern-matching signals. Real coaching stories show roadmap dilemmas, staged modernization choices, and when fast instincts saved or failed leaders. A practical three-question tool and a six-step playbook teach how to name, test, and train instincts without killing their speed. The conversation focuses on spotting weak domains, using data to validate feelings, and learning from retrospectives.
11 snips
Jan 20, 2026 • 44min
79: What Engineers Really Need from Their Leaders: A Conversation with Massimo Belloni
Massimo Belloni, Head of Machine Learning and Data Science at Docplanner and author of The Imposter newsletter, shares key insights on effective leadership. He emphasizes that true leadership is about people, not just technical skills, and how curiosity fosters trust. Massimo discusses the importance of autonomy in engineering, the unseen work that supports leadership, and learning from past mistakes. He encourages leaders to visualize future goals and act with intention, prioritizing transparency and the assumption of good intentions for team dynamics.
