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TDD, TBD, Dynamic Teaming: What would a great CTO do?

You're a CTO overwhelmed with improvement initiatives and pressure from your product team to stop with the Agile nonsense and just ship things. How do you balance your focus and execution?

Note: This is a scheduled email series of our previous webinars that I've prepared for your summer break while I’m on vacation 🏝️ I’ll be back soon for our regular streams and coaching.

💬 Summary

We dig into:

  • What testing has to do with team structure and mobility

  • Why TDD supports dynamic teaming and fast onboarding

  • How leaders shape delivery through what they measure (and ignore)


🎯 What would a great CTO do?

Don’t stop at “Are we testing enough?”. Great CTOs ask whether tests help their teams move faster, switch lanes, and stay sane.

In this webinar, we connect the dots between technical practices and team structure. I explore how TDD supports dynamic teaming, why TBD (trunk-based development) is a legitimate design lens, and how metrics like story points or PR counts quietly shape the team’s habits. If you want to understand how testing and architecture intersect with leadership, this one’s for you.


🔍 Highlights from the Stream

⏱ 00:04:42 — TBD=CI: Trunk-based development is Continuous Integration

TBD reflects a mindset of planning rollout of new features to gain feedback quickly before writing code. It shifts design and release planning upstream of implementation.

⏱ 00:17:50 — Team Rotation Isn’t Risky If You Respect Design

Dynamic teaming works when systems are easy to reason about. TDD and seams reduce onboarding friction in legacy codebases and limit (or expose) knowledge silos.

⏱ 00:31:15 — What a Good CTO Asks About Testing

Is our testing revealing design problems fast enough to respond?

⏱ 00:42:10 — Fast Delivery Requires Fast Understanding

You can’t deliver fast if every engineer has to pause and decipher unclear interfaces. TDD and design feedback loops make this smoother.

⏱ 00:50:45 — What You Measure Drives What You Ignore

If you track story points and PR throughput but ignore change friction, you’ll optimize the wrong thing—and erode team performance.


👉 Watch the full recording above.
✉️ Subscribe to get the rest of this 5-part vacation deep dive series.
💬 Got a team that struggles with mocking, testing, or testability?

Reply to this post — I’d love to hear your challenges.

Thank you

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