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When Everything’s On Fire Surviving and Thriving as a Turnaround CTO

on YouTube 52m
Lightningat CTO Craft Con: Berlin 2025 · 2025-09-23..09-24· [engineering-leadership, software-architecture]

speaker

name:none on file

resources

video:https://youtu.be/pf975UZesAs
slides:none on file

summary

Describes concrete turnaround moves: builds a career ladder, enforces CI/CD, linting and SonarQube, buys Co‑Pilot seats, runs event‑storming and C4 diagrams, bakes refactors into feature epics and runs regular reim sessions so engineers join product early. Moves include a 50/50 CTO/CPTO split, growing teams from 2 to ~12, and automated safeguards to hire faster. Outcomes reported: reduced change failure from 30% to 5% and a new shopping journey that yields 400M euro cumulative impact, plus repeated warnings about AI‑generated, unreadable merges.

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chapters (6)

  1. 0:00Introduction and setup
  2. 1:27Sarah’s turnaround CTO journey
  3. 13:52David’s crisis management lessons
  4. 23:04Dillip’s leadership in chaos
  5. 33:10Burgett’s AI codebase warning
  6. 44:00Q&A with the speakers

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