Technocratic Podcast

About Technocratic Podcast

Are you a technology exec? Join us for practical insights and wisdom from a 4x CTO in Private Equity, Enterprise and Startups. We have great guests that are absolutely crushing it and want to share their experiences, playbooks, best practices and key insights with other top leaders. newsletter.technocratic.io (https://newsletter.technocratic.io?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

For technology execs by technology execs.

Category

business · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

10 Jul 2024

Latest episode

16 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

42 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   16 Jul 2026

   You 3x'd engineering...but how's your roadmap?

   Steve Taplin “sells” engineers for a living.But lately, he’s telling most of his clients the same thing… “You don’t need more of them.” Taplin runs a software engineering firm. His clients call him when something is broken — seven years into a roadmap, nothing shipping… Much of the time, it’s a CEO who wants to know what’s wrong with the engineering team. In more and more cases, after spending a few days on site, he ends up giving them the same answer: engineering isn’t the problem. That is an unusual thing to say when you sell engineering capacity for a living. But that’s what makes Steve so trustworthy. If engineering isn’t the problem — then what is? Here’s how Steve puts it: Engineering is the only function that really adopted AI. The coding assistants work. Teams are faster. The gains are real. But shipping software takes two things: deciding what to build, and building it. AI made the building fast. It did nothing for the deciding. The bottleneck didn’t go away. It just moved upstream, to product. I’ve seen this in my own work: a CTO runs a genuinely good AI program. Then their engineers run out of things to do. Velocity gains only make a difference when there’s a next thing in the queue. It’s easy to clock a review queue back up. But no one’s measuring when a product team fails to make a decision. Product may need to catch up. But there’s still plenty of opportunity for Engineering to push forward. We discuss what those opportunities are and how to execute on them — including these three items that are worth getting started on this week: * Review your backlog. When Steve ran this exercise with a recent client, the measure that came back was 14 years. That number is not an engineering capacity problem…we discuss what it is and what comes next. * Cap how much of your code AI writes. With insider access across dozens of organizations, Steve’s found there is something of a “magic number.” * Flip how you train engineers on AI. For the vast majority of teams, AI writes code → Engineer tests it. Steve’s teams flip it. And get consistently better results. Also in the full episode: * Why I don’t believe AI costs are ever coming down. We were sold this exact promise fifteen years ago and it wasn’t true then either. * The tech debt surprise: why some engineering leaders are suddenly less worried about their legacy code than they were a year ago. And then there’s the central debate — and I want you guys to weigh in on it… Steve says product is starved. It never got the tools engineering got. He wants the person closest to the customer writing the requirements. I think the opposite. In a $100M company, most of product management is coordination. AI now writes the requirements and builds the prototypes. What’s left of the job is talking to customers and picking which problems to solve…let engineering absorb the rest. Tell me what you guys think — settle it for us. Steve and I have gotten into it before. Hear another heated conversation — this time about CTO Leadership - on the Software Leaders Uncensored Podcast. Steve, thanks for joining me. This was a particularly fun conversation — and I suspect we’ll be revisiting some of these core discussion points as things unfold. About Steve Steve Taplin is founder and CEO of Sonatafy Technology (https://sonatafy.com/), a software delivery firm with engineering teams across the US and Latin America, which means he spends most of his working life inside other companies’ delivery problems. He is co-author of The Backlog Illusion (https://thebacklogillusion.com/), written with Sonatafy CTO Chris Horvat, and author of Fail Hard, Win Big (https://www.amazon.com/Fail-Hard-Win-Big-Ventures/dp/B0FFWC64S3). Steve also hosts Software Leaders Uncensored (https://www.youtube.com/@SoftwareLeadersUncensored) — a podcast that features close to 200 conversations with CIOs, CTOs and engineering leaders. Connect with Steve on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stevetaplin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetaplin/) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.technocratic.io/subscribe (https://newsletter.technocratic.io/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   4 Jul 2026

   July 4th Listen: Escape the Chaos of Product, Engineering & AI

   In this episode of Technocratic, I speak with Tracy Edwards (https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardstracy/), a highly experienced product and technology executive, about the messy reality of aligning product, engineering, and business outcomes in the AI era. The conversation starts with a problem almost every technology organization knows too well: teams are busy, roadmaps are full, JIRA is active, velocity charts look impressive — but the business is still asking, “Why didn’t you move the needle?” Tracy brings a practical operator’s view to the conversation, breaking down why engineering and product so often drift apart, why too many OKRs create noise instead of focus, and why roadmap capacity has to be treated like a strategic asset. She also shares a simple but powerful way to think about engineering investment, greenfield innovation, optimization, and maintenance. We also discuss AI’s impact on product & engineering, where Tracy cuts through the hype with a line every executive should hear: AI is not a strategy. It is a tool. We explore why faster coding does not automatically mean better product output, why companies are struggling to measure AI productivity, and why the real breakthrough may not be “doing the same work faster,” but redesigning entire workflows. We also get into taste, judgment, and why product leaders still need to know which problems are worth solving in the first place. I REALLY liked this episode, Tracy was so on the money with everything, and I think you’ll enjoy it. —Bobby 🇺🇸 Quick Links You can find more on Tracy at LinkedIn: * https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardstracy/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardstracy/) And more on Bobby here: * https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-tahir/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-tahir/) If you want to be a guest on Technoratic or host Bobby on your podcast, please contact us at: bobby@technocratic.io This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.technocratic.io/subscribe (https://newsletter.technocratic.io/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   8 Jun 2026

   Why Faster Engineering Hasn’t Touched Your Roadmap

   Chanille Juneau oversees product, engineering, security, DevOps, and QA for Accumulus, a platform that exchanges confidential data between the world’s largest drug makers and regulators in 75+ countries. She’s never written a line of code. It doesn’t matter. The CPTO Role and AI Reward the Same Thing: Systems-Level Thinking A great CPTO doesn’t need dev experience. Chanille Juneau proves that. CPTO is a systems role. The value comes from connecting domains rather than mastering any one of them: seeing how a product bet hits infrastructure cost, how an architecture call lands on support, how a security rule reshapes the roadmap. The hard problems live in those seams, and only someone holding the whole picture catches them in time. Chanille points out how AI works the same way. If you want it to do something really well, it needs all the context. Feed it a thin slice and it produces confident work that doesn’t fit the system around it. The role and the technology reward the same scarce thing: whole-system context. You Only Move as Fast as Your Slowest Stage Engineering velocity is up 30, 50, 80 percent, and the roadmap still hasn’t moved. I hear it from CTOs constantly. The ship rate’s the same, but the bill’s getting bigger. Shipping is a chain: requirements, story, code, QA, deploy, security, prod. You move only as fast as the slowest stage. Speed engineering up 80 percent while security sits at 20 - the whole system gains 20. The bottleneck just moves downstream. So the fix is rebalancing the chain: add QA and security capacity where the work piles up, even if that means fewer engineers. More engineering seats won’t move it; that stage was probably never your constraint. AI ROI is a throughput problem. Judgment Is the Job Now AI amplifies whatever direction you give it. Point it at a sharp problem with clear context and it gets you somewhere good - fast. Point it at a vague one and it gets you somewhere bad just as quickly. You can’t hand it your product strategy and walk away. When AI can produce any output, the scarce input is judgment: knowing which problem to point it at, and why. AI does junior-level work well, which tempts leaders to keep only seniors. Push that across the industry and you starve the pipeline that grows seniors in the first place. Judgment is the one thing you can’t automate, and cutting the junior ranks is how you stop building it. In the episode: * How to put AI features in front of customers who legally can’t switch them on yet, without slowing the sale or the rollout. * Why running out of AI credits actually points to success right now - and whether that bill ever comes back down. * Why I think AI is making the hardest job in tech harder, not easier: three mandates landing on one person. I’ve done this job. It’s the hardest in tech short of the CISO’s, and AI is making it harder. Chanille makes it seem doable, nonetheless. Listen to the full episode to find out how. About Chanille Juneau Chanille Juneau is Chief Product and Technology Officer at Accumulus Technologies, the company spun out in 2025 to commercialize a platform that lets life sciences companies exchange data and submissions with regulators across 75+ countries in real time. She was previously Chief Technology Officer at Berry Appleman & Leiden, where the software her team built helped land the firm on Fast Company’s 2023 World’s Most Innovative Companies list. She came up through product, not engineering, and holds a degree in biomedical science she now puts to work in the industry she helps run. Connect with Chanille: linkedin.com/in/chanille This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.technocratic.io/subscribe (https://newsletter.technocratic.io/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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