The CTO Podcast · Insights & Strategies for Chief Technology Officers Navigating the C-Suite while Balancing Technical Strategy, Team Management, & Innovation

Dave Adsit, VP of Engineering SamCart: Coding Roots to C-Suite Insights

·1 hr 11 min·4 clips

Dave Adsit says he is “obsessed with creating value continuously and in small batches.”

The episode starts with a shared memory of the Atari 800XL. That detail becomes the doorway into a broader discussion of how early computing shapes later judgment. Dave Atzit joins as VP of Engineering at SamCart. The conversation moves past nostalgia fast and into the work of leading engineering teams. Product management comes up first, then product flow. The host and guest work through how complexity shows up in real teams and why it is not enough for leaders to understand the system themselves. A team has to be able to live the operating model in daily work. That idea sits near the center of the discussion. The episode stays grounded in lived experience rather than theory. One of the clearest examples is release cadence. Feature flags become a way to think about customer tolerance for change. Some customers want to see new improvements every day. Others prefer to absorb changes in bigger, slower batches. Neither group is treated as wrong. The point is that the economics of the choice matter. That opens into a broader look at tradeoffs in software delivery. Queues, backlog, latency, and resource utilization all come into view. Backlog is treated as real delay, not an abstract metric. The conversation uses that idea to show how operating choices shape what a team can respond to later. The host and guest keep returning to the same practical question: where is the good-enough point for this system. The answer is not perfection. It is finding a cadence and structure that fit the business and the customers well enough to hold. Near the end, the conversation lands on a compact leadership frame: input, output, outcome, and impact. That gives the episode a clean finish after a lot of thoughtful back-and-forth.

As heard by us

A practical engineering conversation that turns product flow, delivery cadence, and team effectiveness into a usable frame.

Engineering leadership here is treated as a series of tradeoffs, not slogans. Dave Atzit, the VP of Engineering at SamCart, keeps pulling the conversation back to product management, product flow, and the habits teams need if they want those ideas to show up in day-to-day work.

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Why you'd press play

You want a CTO conversation that makes delivery cadence and team flow feel concrete.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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