CTO Craft Con: Berlin 2025
2025-09-23..2025-09-24
Berlin, Germany
as the organisers put it
Join CTO Craft Con Europe 2026 in Amsterdam - an intimate, community-centered gathering for engineering leaders to connect, learn through insightful sessions, and build real peer relationships in a supportive environment.
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Missed Berlin Conversations? Here's what made it so special. | 01m | |
And a chance to meet our VIP guest, Tofu, arguably Berlin's cutest tech pooch. 🐶✨From inspiring conversations and new connections to plenty of memorable… | ||
| AI Access is not AI Ability A Cautionary Tale on the Importance of Dev | Hywel Carver | 26m |
Claim: having ChatGPT access is not enough — teams need AI access ≠ AI ability and measured training. Recent Meta study shows developers expect ~24% speedups… | ||
| Why are 41% of CTO’s Looking to Leave Their Job | Henry Draper | 11m |
2025 compensation survey from Albany and CTOCraft finds 41% of technology leaders say they are looking to leave, driven chiefly by loss of faith in leadership… | ||
| Calm in the Chaos Leading in the Permacrisis | Ceri Newton-Sargunar | 27m |
An intervention case shows around 80 people handing in their notice over five days and uses the hand‑brain model to explain how stress flips the cortex into a… | ||
| When Everything’s On Fire Surviving and Thriving as a Turnaround CTO | 52m | |
Describes concrete turnaround moves: builds a career ladder, enforces CI/CD, linting and SonarQube, buys Co‑Pilot seats, runs event‑storming and C4 diagrams… | ||
| The Resource Conscious CTO Building More with Less | Andrea Perizzato, Olga Khorova, Dirk Daumann, Konark Modi | 47m |
Panelists trade high-level advice for concrete moves: daily cloud spend emails that surface $1 storage leaks and cut runaway costs, tagging backlogs and tools… | ||
| Side Quest Unlocked Community, Connection and the Future o | Melinda Seckington | 25m |
Argues that team glue work (mentoring, documenting, facilitating) and community glue work (meetups, open source, organizing) are distinct but mutually… | ||
| From Startup to Scale Up Designing for Growth from Day One | Matthias Laug | 24m |
Historic wins and missteps make specific recommendations: don’t freeze in Jira dashboards and burndown theater—ticket obsession wastes founder time; rigid… | ||
| Building High Trust Teams in an AI Enabled Engineering Org | Paul Lunow | 24m |
Framework is threefold: skills, mindset, practice, with concrete actions not abstractions. Run structured experiments (more than paste-and-prompt) and start by… | ||
| The CTO Spectrum – Which Archetype Are You | Patrick Kua | 26m |
Maps eight practical CTO roles and ties each to concrete decisions: founder CTO is hands‑on, splits time between fundraising and code; fractional CTO… | ||
| AI and Engineering Closing the Gap Between Expectations and Reality 1 | Luca Rossi | 32m |
Surveying 100,000 engineers finds 27% save 10+ hours/week and 54% save 5+ hours, yet case studies split: some individual authors report 5x speedups and EveryY… | ||
| Quietly Powerful Leadership for the Ones Who Don’t Shout | Limor Bergman | 25m |
Three practical habits: clarity, curiosity, calm confidence. Bring clarity with one-on-ones and short written assumptions so teams know what to do under… | ||
| Closing remarks | Lee Jon | 02m |
Argues that leadership and systems design hinge on knowing when to push and when to retreat, using two concrete metaphors: a good landing is one you walk away… | ||
| Motivational Leadership Driving Change Through Empowered Eng | Kimberly Schmitt | 23m |
Turns a team-level observability project into a company-wide incident management system by building a new data architecture, mapping user journeys, adding SLOs… | ||
| How Bad Actors AbUse LLMs The Mechanisms That Enable Misuse and What We Can Do About | Clo Amunodice, Kimberly Matthews, Mackenzie Jackson | 26m |
Teams detail concrete defenses and failures: they use predefined prompts and OpenAI guardrails to constrain chat features, deploy Phoenix tracing and Grafana… | ||
| If Feedback is a Gift, Why Does it Never Feel Like One | Matus Mayer | 26m |
Argues that feedback becomes useful only when expectations, cadence and specificity are concrete: set measurable role outcomes, run a monthly feedback… | ||
| Intelligent Connections Transforming Work Through Strategic AI Integration | Gertrud Kolb | 30m |
Scout24 is gluing systems with AI to turn isolated assistants into actionable workflows: enterprise Claude enterprise license across 1,100 staff plus local and… | ||
| Making Better Decisions – How we Decide Better Together | Tobias Mende | 25m |
Describes concrete decision methods and when to use them: systemic consensing where everyone rates options 0–5 for resistance and the lowest-sum option wins… | ||
| Challenger Safety The Missing Link in Your Innovation Playbook | Carol Palombini | 24m |
Argues that psychological safety isn’t enough for innovation and defines Challenger Safety as the needed next level where people feel protected from… | ||
| Opening Remarks | Lee Jon | 03m |
Conference frames AI that can write code and monitoring that predicts failures but systems remain fragile, with a real incident where a testing environment on… | ||
| Beyond the Buzz Building Developer Platforms That Drive Business Success | Shweta Bora | 23m |
Claims four concrete failure modes—over-automation without user insight, rigid standardisation, neglecting integration, and building in isolation—and shows an… | ||
| Leading Through Change Merging Two Marketplaces in Public | Alesia Braga | 16m |
Merged four acquired marketplaces into one platform that integrates 800+ suppliers across 130 countries, after pausing legacy work to pause all development on… | ||
| The Changing Face of Engineering What Teams Need Now 002 | Cristina Turbatu, Martin Lefinghausen, Agnieszka Michalik, Anna J McDougall | 41m |
Hiring becomes harder because AI-generated CVs and candidates using ChatGPT appear in screening; teams add math tests, design tasks and a “McDougall method”… | ||
| The Always On Culture Redefining Urgency and Availability | Greg Ryzhov | 22m |
Claims that 70% of large-scale change fails while 10% overperform thanks to a focused, shared real urgency, backed by John Carter; contrasts that with false… | ||
| Back to the Code Why CTOs Must Get Technical Again to Solve AI’s Real Pro | Rob Zuber | 26m |
CircleCI applies agent decomposition to replace fragile monolithic prompts and ships an autonomous product called Chunk autonomous validation agent that… | ||
| How Misjudging the Importance of an Unloved Project can Turn Into a Dis | Jerzy | 20m |
A legacy hosting product serving 1,000 clients and delivering only 5% of revenue runs on a 12‑year old seph 50 TB cluster, goes offline after a power failure… | ||
| Richard Gross Head of Software Archeology, MaibornWolff | Richard Gross | 24m |
Compares renovating a house with modernizing a legacy app and shows concrete outcomes: codebase maps produced with CodeCharta reveal a lower-tier code area… | ||
| nothing matches | ||