alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

Plan and PRACTICE for better incident response with insights from Tim Armandpour, CTO of PagerDuty. Learn the secrets to resilience from the team that mitigated the impact of a major outage—handling a 250% traffic surge while delivering on their SLA. Listen to find out: - 🛠️ Why planning AND practice are both critical for incident response. - 🚧 How to practice for incident response (e.g Failure Fridays with Chaos Engineering) - 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Ownership: Why tech AND business teams must join post-mortems. - ☁️ How to mitigate the impact of your cloud provider’s lower SLA. - ⚓ Which architectural patterns are more resilient? - ⚖️ WARNING: “bend” the CAP theorem at your own risk Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/113-tim-armandpour-cto-pagerduty

Find out about cross-functional team members with Daniel Bartholomae, CTO at optilyz (direct mail SaaS). At optilyz, team members wear multiple hats—whatever hats they need to own the product lifecycle. From product management and design to development and customer engagement, this model eliminates silos and drives efficiency. Daniel breaks down how this innovative approach works, the tools and processes that make it possible, and why it’s a perfect fit for small B2B SaaS companies. Listen to find out: 🚀 How ‘no product managers’ = efficient ‘sprints’ 🛠️ Why optilyz opts for Miro and Asana instead of Jira 🧩 How to find and hire the right people for cross-functional roles 📜 Architectural Decision Records (ADRs): How optilyz documents technical decisions Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/112-daniel-bartholomae-cto-optilyz

How do we actually organize people to consistently deliver value and enjoy the process? This, Eric Bowman (CTO @ King) says, is the core challenge facing any CTO. In this thought-provoking episode, Eric shares insights from his remarkable career in gaming (The Sims, King), e-commerce (Zalando), and navigation technology (TomTom), offering a unique perspective on building high-performing teams and effective tech organizations. Listen in to explore: 🔄 Outcome AND Outputs → Impact (ala Kent Beck’s Universal Value Streams) 🤖 Theory of Adjacent Possibility + Why AI isn’t there yet ⚖️ Product + Tech: Single-threaded (Amazon) vs. Dual Role (Marty Cagan or Google) 🎯 Goals: Kanban-Style Stack Ranking that limits Work-in-Progress 📈 ROI of Tech: Does it increase revenue or speed up delivery? 🧘 Discipline = Action & Commitment + is it time to rethink small teams and platform engineering? Have a listen. Eric has such a great combination of great combination of experience 🦾, knowledge 📚 and wisdom 🧠. Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/111-eric-bowman-cto-king

Become a more effective team in this CTO podcast featuring Rebecca Murphey, Field CTO of Swarmia and co-author of Build. From her years of experience working in the developer productivity organizations at Stripe and Indeed and now at Swarmia, Rebecca knows this conversation isn’t just about developer metrics and productivity - it’s about the broader picture 🖼️. How do we align🧭 our engineering work with with business outcomes💸, developer experience 😀AND developer productivity⚡. And just as important, how do we communicate what we’re doing (and not doing) to other stakeholders? Listen to find out: 🔄 Queuing Theory as paradigm for developer workflow evaluation ⏳ How to allocate time for different engineering tasks 👥 Team Metrics vs. 🧑‍💻 Individual Metrics 📊 Metrics: DORA, SPACE, BRAINs, and more ⚖️ The ethical debate on tracking developer metrics 🤔 If you optimize for the quarter, do you de-optimize for the future? Listen here: https://alphalist.com/podcast/110-rebecca-murphey-field-cto-swarmia-and-co-author-of-build