cto summit
BEYOND THE HYPE
Jack Godau
Freelance CTO/CPO - Digital Evolution Expert
Jack Godau has spent 25+ years learning that the hardest part of technology leadership isn't the technology. It's the people, the culture and getting everyone pointed in the same direction without resorting to threats or worse still motivational posters.
As CTO, CDO and CISO across multiple organisations, he's built engineering teams from scratch, scaled them to 150+ people across multiple continents, inherited cultures that needed fixing, and occasionally broken cultures that were working fine.
Through it all, he's developed a conviction that vision, values and culture aren't soft skills or HR territory - they're the core infrastructure that tech leaders ignore at their peril.
Jack believes the best Tech Leaders are translators first and technologists second: people who bridge business strategy, engineering teams and stakeholders to create environments where good work actually happens. He leads with empathy and a shared vision, which he admits sounds like consultant-speak until you've experienced the alternative.
His technical background includes building end-to-end SaaS platforms, architecting privacy-by-design systems under GDPR and German healthcare regulations and delivering critical national infrastructure where failure isn't an option.
He's raised €15+ million in VC funded startups and learned that investors care about team culture more than most tech leaders realise.
Through VRR Consulting, he provides interim CTO/CPO services focused on engineering team performance and culture. He's a founding member of The EL Club (Empathic Leadership Club) in Berlin and mentors emerging Tech Leaders through The Mentoring Club online and in person.
Stop Reading the Code: Why AI Moves Engineering Rigour to the Boundary
Most engineering leaders are bracing for AI to replace their developers. The harder truth is that AI is quietly making the thing engineers are proudest of (clean code, clever implementation) the cheap part of the job, and making the thing most avoid (precise specifications, trustworthy contracts) the whole job. As leaders at scale we already stopped reading every line years ago, so why is AI different? The rigour hasn't disappeared, it has moved from inside the box to the boundaries: the specs, the conformance tests, the observability that catches the module that passes every test and is still quietly wrong.
The leaders who win will know which boundaries to trust and which to open; those who keep auditing implementation at machine volume will drown. The session gives leaders a model for deciding where to trust the black box and where to open it, drawn from the trade-offs that govern cars, hardware and every field that climbed an abstraction layer before us.