11 Best Engineering Leadership Podcasts for CTOs in 2026

There’s no handbook for being a newly appointed head of engineering, though a solid reading list of books for engineering managers gets you closer than most training programs do. It’s something you have to learn in the trenches, preferably from a mentor and certainly from fellow operators being candid about their own errors.

A great podcast is just that: someone else’s error, given to you at zero cost. A specific episode at a critical time could save you months of struggling through the same learning curve.

These are the podcasts I’d recommend to an incoming CTO, and also what to do with an episode when you’re done listening.

The quick list

Podcast	Host(s)	Best for
Startup Hustle	Matt Watson	Founder and CTO war stories, no filters
Modern CTO	Joel Beasley	Scaling a business from a CTO perspective
Alphalist CTO Podcast	Tobias Schlottke	What CTOs in larger, more mature businesses deal with
Behind the Tech	Kevin Scott	How actual products were made, from an active CTO
The CTO Podcast (7CTOs)	Etienne de Bruin	Hiring and managing time for tech leads
CXO Talk	Michael Krigsman	Broad, long interviews with executives of all types
Dev Interrupted	The team at LinearB	The performance of engineering teams and platform engineering
The Pragmatic Engineer	Gergely Orosz	Headcount, compensation, scaling, asked directly
The Tech Trek	Amir Bormand	Growing teams that deliver under stress
CTO Think	Don Vandemark & Randy Burgess	Two seasoned CTOs thinking out loud
Programming Leadership	Marcus Blankenship	The jump from programmer to your first management role

Why most “best engineering leadership podcast” lists aren’t about leadership

There’s no shortage of lists that include dozens of episodes on Kubernetes, Docker Compose, or whatever the new fancy way to build a CI/CD pipeline is. I’ve listened to some of them. They’re great shows. But they don’t answer the question a CTO has when he’s staring at a half-empty whiteboard with two senior engineers wondering if it would be better to hire more developers or more SREs.

CTO podcasts and DevOps podcasts answer two very different questions, and most lists confuse the two for no good reason other than making the list look bigger than it actually is. Every show on the above list is included because it’s relevant to the job of engineering management. Not the job of software development. Not the job of infrastructure operations. The job of leading the humans who do the other jobs.

1. Startup Hustle

I host the Startup Hustle podcast, so there’s that. I run Full Scale and created Startup Hustle because I wanted the conversation I never got to have with someone who’d already made the mistake I was about to make.

Hundreds of episodes in, it’s still a mix of founders, CTOs, and operators talking about what actually went wrong and what they did about it. Nobody shows up with a highlight reel.

The episode I’d actually point a CTO at first is Fixing the Language Barrier Between Engineers and Executives with Karell Ste-Marie. It’s about the exact gap most engineering leaders fall into: knowing the technical answer and losing the room anyway because nobody translated it into something the business side could act on.

2. Modern CTO

Joel Beasley talks to CTOs about the part of the job nobody puts in the job description: how to scale a business from within. This is illustrated by what happened when a specific team hit 40 people and the old way of running things stopped working. More action, less philosophy. Listen to Modern CTO.

3. Alphalist CTO Podcast

Tobias Schlottke has some CTOs of actual companies that most developers have heard of on the show as well. GitHub, Cloudflare, Slack, and Nvidia were among the recent guests. He talks about issues that come up when you’re past the early startup phase. Things like platform decisions, adopting AI at scale, or the complexities of office politics in a larger organization. Worth a listen if your challenges have moved beyond “how do we ship faster.” Alphalist CTO Podcast is here.

4. Behind the Tech

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott has the luxury of actually doing the job he’s interviewing his guests about. Behind the Tech peels back the launch announcements to focus on the decision-making and the dumb luck involved in building out a product. This is a slower, more meditative format than most in this list, less an interview and more a documentary. Behind the Tech is here.

5. The CTO Podcast (7CTOs)

Etienne de Bruin started 7CTOs, a training program designed for CTO development, and then wrote the book on it, literally, CTO Excellence in 100 Days.

The CTO Podcast sticks with the leadership aspects that don’t appear on architecture diagrams: hiring, and how you actually spend your time. Find The CTO Podcast here.

6. CXO Talk

Krigsman started the show in 2013, and since then he’s interviewed nearly a thousand business leaders. And it’s not just about engineering. The guest list includes CMOs, CFOs, and other C-suite leaders along with CTOs.

It’s worth it because your peers aren’t only other engineering leaders. If you want to know how the rest of the exec team actually thinks about risk, budget, and priorities, this show is putting you in that room. Listen to CXO Talk.

7. Dev Interrupted

This podcast, hosted by the crew behind LinearB, is all about measuring your dev teams’ productivity. You’ll find discussions of DORA metrics, platform engineering, and recently, what AI-native development really means beyond the buzzwords. This one’s the closest thing to a research report on the list, except that the researchers are people with opinions. Dev Interrupted is available here.

8. The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz asks all the questions his own subscribers are curious about. No polite pleasantries. He gets right to the number of people on each team, comp bands and migration failures. If you’re looking for a no-frills look at what an organization of this size is really like, listen to this first. Listen to The Pragmatic Engineer.

9. The Tech Trek

Amir Bormand intends to keep this one tight: how do you create a team that can produce during a crunch with a real deadline and a real customer on the other side?

Listen to it before your next tough quarter when there’s still time to adjust things. Find The Tech Trek here.

10. CTO Think

Don Vandemark and Randy Burgess are both former CTOs, and it comes across when they talk to each other, as well as to their guests.

Sometimes there’s no guest. It’s just two former CTOs, one in Orlando and one in Kansas City, arguing about a decision in front of you. If you learn more by overhearing a genuine disagreement than from a well-produced monologue, then this is your podcast. Find CTO Think here.

11. Programming Leadership

Marcus Blankenship’s podcast was created for those transitioning from being the smartest developer in the room to taking responsibility for the people in the room. He assumes that most listeners have already passed through this phase. Listen to Programming Leadership.

If you’ve been managing for about a year and it still feels a little bit like improv, listen to this podcast before getting into the more advanced topics on this list.

How to actually get something out of these

If someone tells me they listen to leadership podcasts, I’m assuming they’re playing one on the way to work and aren’t retaining anything. No offense to those people. It’s just not how it works.

A podcast episode is only worth your time if it gives you something specific enough to actually implement that week. A good feeling isn’t enough. Vaguely nodding along to “communication matters” isn’t enough, even if it feels like you’ve learned a lot in the car.

What matters is that you can look back after a week and identify something you changed: I handled this different way on Tuesday because I listened to a podcast episode on Monday.

After a podcast episode, you should be able to complete this sentence: because of this episode, I’m going to do X differently this week. If you can’t fill in the X, you didn’t get anything out of it. You just filled 45 minutes.

Practical experience is the best way to learn. A good mentor is the next best way. Podcasts and books can help when you don’t have practical experience or mentors yet, as long as you use them. Listening and learning are different things: one makes your Mondays better, the other just makes your commute better.

I wrote more about how to transition from a builder to a leader if you are in that stage, or about how to become a 10x leader if you are in that stage already and want to hire for it.