Guest: Stephan Schmid, CTO Coach at Amazing CTO, 40+ years in tech
Stephan has been building things with code since the 1980s. That’s three tech revolutions: personal computers, the internet, and now AI. When someone with that perspective tells you the role of CTO might disappear for most companies, it’s worth listening.
I wanted to talk to Stephan because he’s coaching CTOs and engineering leaders right now. I’ve been watching startups adopt the product engineer model for years. But I hadn’t thought much about what happens to the people above them. What does leadership even look like when your engineers can build five times faster?
The Efficiency Drive Killed Agile
Stephan was an early adopter. He walked into his university professor’s office with the Extreme Programming book and said: we’re doing this now. He became a certified Scrum Master. He helped companies introduce Scrum.
And then he watched it fail. Over and over.
“What people learned back then is that the tool does not help. The tool does not drive the change. And so a lot of Agile failed for more than ten years.”
The problem wasn’t the methodology. It was the efficiency obsession. Product managers started working one sprint ahead. Then designers worked two sprints ahead. Then business was planning four sprints ahead.
“Because of the drive for efficiency, you get far away from the ideal of product managers, designers, and developers sitting together, working together at one point in time on one feature.”
We optimized ourselves right back into waterfall. Just with different names for the meetings.
Code Isn’t the Bottleneck
Here’s the uncomfortable observation: most people assumed engineering was the constraint. Stephan never bought it.
“I always thought that bottleneck is in product management. And I think now it becomes obvious to people that that’s the case.”
AI just made it undeniable. If I can build five times faster, I need to ask my product manager five times as often. That math doesn’t work.
“The reaction of product engineering is the merging of some parts of product management and some parts of engineering together with AI. With more local autonomy in decisions and responsibilities.”
The product engineer isn’t a new buzzword. It’s a structural response to a real bottleneck.
You Build the Wrong Thing More Efficiently
Stephan made a point that stuck with me. Waterfall has perceived efficiency gains. You build the wrong thing, but you build it more efficiently.
“The output is worse with waterfall, but the efficiency is better. You build the wrong thing more efficiently with waterfall.”
But now AI tips the scales. The efficiency gains from AI are so large they obliterate whatever you thought you were gaining from working in siloed sprints ahead.
“AI efficiency gains kill the waterfall efficiency gains. So that’s why waterfall will not make a comeback with AI. The ultra anti-waterfall is basically the product engineer.”
That’s a bold claim. But I think he’s right.
Leadership Isn’t There Yet
I asked Stephan how leadership changes when you have autonomous product engineers who own problems end-to-end. His answer surprised me.
“I think leadership will come in. It’s not there today.”
He’s not saying leadership needs to evolve. He’s saying it barely exists in most companies.
“I look into companies, they are very weak on vision. They usually are very, very weak on strategy. They are very reactive to competition, to the market.”
Command structures told people what to do. That’s not leadership. Leadership is declaring a direction and building trust that people will follow.
“Leadership is a very active role in thinking, look, this is a golden future. And we will go there. And then it’s also partially like I’m the leader. Trust me.”
With product engineers making local decisions, someone needs to be weaving a coherent story. Otherwise you have autonomy without alignment.
Managers as Storytellers
So what does that alignment actually look like in practice?
Stephan used an analogy I hadn’t heard before. Imagine people walking through a field. It starts thundering. Everyone is afraid, confused.
“There was always someone who said, don’t worry. The reason it’s thundering is because this morning the thunder god ate something bad. And then people said, okay, that makes sense. Let’s keep walking.”
That’s what managers do. They connect disconnected phenomena into a narrative that helps people keep moving.
“Creating a narrative that makes sense for everyone out of these disconnected things.”
It’s not entertainment. But it’s also a little bit entertainment. Stephan admitted he sees part of his management role as making sure everyone is happy and engaged. “Sometimes it’s like a holiday club.”
The CTO Role Might Disappear
Stephan coaches CTOs. And he’s telling them to prepare for their role to either transform radically or vanish entirely.
“There’s a non-zero chance that the CTO role will go away completely for a lot of companies. If you’re SpaceX, you’re going to have a CTO. But if you have a website with a database, you’re not going to have a CTO.”
His advice: move into a CPTO role. Own AI before someone else does. Drive technical innovation, don’t just execute what product asks for.
“The CTO role that CTOs today think is since eternal times is going to change.”
The Scissors in Your Head
I asked what “bullish on AI” actually means. It’s not about hype.
“Organizations will be able to create much bigger stuff. Things you thought were not possible for one person to build are now possible for one person to build.”
He mentioned a library someone released that had no code. Just a prompt and a hundred test cases. The AI reads them and implements the library in whatever language you need.
That’s not practical yet. But it shows the direction.
“That’s what AI enables. The flourishing of people.”
Make Product Engineer a Promotion
One practical tip stood out. A client of Stephan’s didn’t just rename developers to product engineers. He made it a promotion.
“You need to be promoted to become a product engineer. You need to be able to do this, this, and this. And then you can be promoted.”
It’s painful. But the results are better.
“If you just rename people and roles, you will have a lot of problems with the execution. Making it a promotion, the implementation will be much better.”
Right now, about 80% of product engineers will come from engineering and 20% from product. Stephan thinks that ratio will shift as AI tools get easier.
What Developers Might Find Out
Stephan drew a parallel to journalists. They thought people read newspapers for information and investigative reporting. Then social media arrived.
“They found out what people were interested in was entertainment. People opened the newspaper each morning because they wanted to be entertained, not to be informed.”
He thinks developers might face a similar reckoning.
“Developers will find out with the AI wave that people valued them for different things than they valued themselves.”
That’s not comfortable to hear. But it’s worth sitting with.
We can build faster now. The question is whether we’re ready to let go of identities built around how we used to build.
