Here’s an early look at what we’ve got planned.
From hands-on sessions to inspiring keynotes, this agenda snapshot gives you a feel for the conversations and connections waiting for you at CTO Craft Con.
More to be revealed soon!
Keynote
AI as a Thinking Partner: Leading with Clarity and Confidence
- Beyond faster coding, AI can act as a writing partner, coach, and sounding board, helping leaders sharpen their thinking and test assumptions.
- Using AI for prompts, deep research, and contrarian views expands perspective and reduces the isolation of senior decision-making.
- Context windows allow leaders to see reasoning play out step by step, creating transparency and clarity in choices.
- Find out how treating AI as a cognitive partner helps leaders make stronger decisions, communicate better, and lead with confidence.
James Stanier, CTO, Veterinary, Nordhealth
Keynote
Leading at the Edge: Lessons from the World’s Highest Peaks
- Engage in a story about climbing the Seven Summits and how it shows that leadership under pressure is about calm judgment and strategic choices, whether facing a storm on Everest or a crisis in business.
- The strongest teams are diverse and built on trust, and this is equally true in tech where women and underrepresented groups often have to push harder to be heard.
- Focus on how real resilience is not about pushing endlessly but about knowing when to pause, reset, and protect energy so leadership can continue the next day.
- Strength in extreme environments comes from strategy, collaboration, and balance, lessons that guide both mountain expeditions and the challenges of modern leadership.
Dr. Ilknur Colak, CTO, Schneider Electric
Presentation
Owning the Stack: A CTO’s Guide to Building In-House Systems
- A first-hand account of leading Holland & Barrett’s tech transformation since 2020, moving away from legacy systems toward building in-house platforms.
- Lessons on balancing speed, scale, and resilience while shifting to proprietary systems, and how this shaped engineering culture and delivery.
Sathya Nandakumar, CTO, Holland & Barrett
Presentation
From SaaS to Agentic Platforms: Reinventing Software for Goal-driven Systems
- The software industry is entering a new architectural era, moving beyond user-driven SaaS workflows toward agentic platforms that can understand goals, reason, and act across services.
- Explore how leading SaaS organisations are evolving from transactional products to adaptive, goal-driven ecosystems.
- Learn how architectures must shift from stateless APIs to orchestrated, stateful agents, and how pricing, SLAs, and user experience are being reimagined as software becomes autonomous.
- You will learn what CTOs can do now to prepare their systems, governance, and strategy for the coming agentic age.
Jaime de Mora, CTO, Startups & Digital Natives, Microsoft EMEA
Presentation
AI in the Trenches: Real-World Wins Without Breaking Things
- AI for Speed and Stability – How the region’s largest e-commerce company and its 2,000-engineer team used LLMs and automation (n8n, Cursor, A2A, MCPS, custom workflows) to raise delivery speed 30% without risking production.
- Practical AI Integration – Automated tests, instant documentation, and rapid code reviews that keep quality high and developers happy.
- Trust + Governance – A clear framework for selecting the right AI stack, measuring real impact, and keeping engineers confident in every release.
- From Hype to Hard Truths – A battle-tested playbook on what truly worked and what flopped, so you can safely replicate the gains in your own organization.
Yigit Darcin, Director of Engineering – Core Ecommerce Platform, Trendyol
Fireside Chat
Applied Tech for Climate Action: Turning Complex Problems into Scalable Solutions
- Journey behind the scenes of how complex climate policy can be transformed into actionable data, and why inclusive innovation is essential to tackling global challenges.
- The story begins with the founding idea of a mission-driven venture and shows how a team scaled AI solutions to address one of the biggest problems of our future.
- Hear how AI-driven insights can shape climate policy, influence stakeholders, and push real initiatives forward.
- Learn about pitfalls and best practices, from handling unstructured data and reducing model bias to gathering training data, deploying models, and proving measurable ROI.
Georgie Steele, Co-Founder & CTO, Maiven
Panel
Engineering in Flux: Skills, Teams, and Tech
- AI-enabled software development is shifting engineering focus away from repetitive coding tasks toward higher-level design, review, and architecture. Leaders need to rethink what skills matter most now.
- As AI tools generate more code and suggestions, developers must double down on judgment, context, and code ownership rather than trusting outputs blindly.
- Engineering teams must adapt onboarding, training, and review processes so they support human/AI collaboration rather than treating AI as a plug-in.
- The panel will explore real-world examples of successful AI-enabled development, the pitfalls of overreliance, and how leaders balance speed, oversight, and human insight.
Qaiser Mazhar, CTO, IG Group
Tavier Taylor, Board Advisor & CTO, TFM Innovations
David Kavanagh, CTO, Tillo
Presentation
Side Quest Unlocked: Community Glue Work and the Future of Tech
- Just like side quests in an RPG, the work that seems optional in tech — mentoring, documenting knowledge, or organising events — can unlock unexpected skills and opportunities.
- The best engineers are not only strong coders, they also bring people together, strengthen teams, and help communities grow.
- You do not need to take on every side quest, but building connections and sharing knowledge can be just as important for career growth as technical output.
- This talk will show how community “glue” work builds leadership skills, why it should be recognised by companies, and how it shapes the future of engineering.
Melinda Seckington, Leadership Trainer & Consultant, Learn Build Share
Presentation
An Engineer and an LLM Log into a Tech Interview: Are They Cheating?
- Traditional technical rounds are outdated in the age of AI, as tools can easily bypass take-home tests and DSA formats measure memorisation rather than real-world skills.
- Hear how Anna redesigned the process around the “First Day of Work” concept, creating the McDougall Method to reflect actual engineering practice.
- The framework includes practical guidelines for structuring repositories, creating meaningful test cases, and sharing them in a way that feels fair and realistic.
- Understand the crucial part of the approach: training engineers to run interviews that give candidates a positive, authentic experience.
Anna McDougall, Director of Engineering Operations, Blinkist
Lightning Talks
Working at the Speed of Change: Safety, Trust, and Adaptation
Change in tech rarely comes at a gentle pace. Teams face restructures, acquisitions, shifting goals, and rising workloads, often all at once. These lightning talks will share how leaders keep people motivated and connected during constant change, while also protecting the trust and psychological safety that make experimentation possible. Attendees will hear how to sustain focus, encourage open conversations about risks, and build habits that help teams adapt quickly without burning out.
What are Lightning Talks? They are a series of 10 minute presentations and an opportunity for senior tech leaders to tell their side of the story about leadership and psychological safety.
Jenny Martin, Collaboration Coach, Collaborate Solutions
Ceri Newton-Sargunar, Systemic Behavioural Coach, Thirsty Horse Consulting
Matthew Bellringer, Neurodiversity and Innovation Specialist, Meaningbit
Presentation
So, You’ve Been Eaten…
- Being on the receiving end of tech due diligence can feel intimidating and often exposes how unprepared teams are, both technically and emotionally.
- Hear about lessons from both sides of the table, the discomfort of being unprepared and the clarity that comes with running the process well.
- Learn that preparation means more than code quality: it includes your systems, documentation, and the way your team responds under questioning.
- You’ll walk away with a practical guide and checklist to approach your first tech due diligence in an investment round or merger with confidence.
Kees Jan Koster, Family Office Advisor | Technology Advisor
Presentation
The Human Load Balancer: Protecting Your Team Without Burning Out
- Engineering leaders often take pride in shielding their teams from shifting demands, organisational dysfunction, and emotional strain, but this invisible work can quietly build up and take a toll.
- In today’s climate of disruption and uncertainty, hear how the weight of this hidden labour is heavier than ever, making mental health and self-care a core part of sustainable leadership.
- Drawing on real experience, this session will show you how to recognise when invisible work is leading toward burnout, how to reframe what it means to support a team, and what tools help you stay balanced.
- You will learn how to spot signs of overload, set healthier boundaries without abandoning responsibilities, move away from the myth of the “hero leader,” and build practices that support long-term resilience.
Rebecca Anderton, Head of Engineering, hedgehog lab
Presentation
The End of the Road in Performance Management: Why, When and How to let go of Poor Performers in Software Engineering Teams
- Letting people go for poor performance is difficult for many managers and often avoided in company cultures that find the process uncomfortable.
- Much of the advice on performance management comes from the US, but UK culture and employment law are very different, and there is no “at will” employment.
- Explore when letting someone go is necessary, what steps to try before reaching that point, and how to handle the process with fairness.
- Understand both positive and negative outcomes, and focus on how to make the process less damaging and more constructive for everyone involved.
Andrew Ellam, Interim CTO, Previsico
Presentation
The End of the Road in Performance Management: Why, When and How to let go of Poor Performers in Software Engineering Teams
- Scaling five teams of engineers in nine months required building strong foundations from the start, with continuous delivery used as the backbone for rapid iteration without piling up technical debt.
- Find out how hiring in the age of AI means designing assessments that cannot be gamed by tools and that bring real skills to the surface.
- Look at defining what good looks like through lightweight processes such as code reviews, RFCs, and onboarding helps maintain consistency as teams grow quickly.
- Culture fit should not mean culture clones, so assess for adaptability, ownership, and collaboration, and what to do differently after making tough trade-offs under pressure.
Mikey Mo, Head of Engineering, Lantern
Presentation
Size 42 Isn’t Enough: How Diverse Views Build Better Products
- Stories from fashion tech and leadership coaching show how something as simple as bra sizing can reveal blind spots in product development and AI design.
- Discover how our personal backgrounds, body types, and shopping habits influence how we interpret data, and teams lacking diversity miss both the pitfalls and the opportunities this creates.
- Using real examples such as a memorable encounter with an AI image generator, we will explore how bias shows up in unexpected ways.
- You’ll leave with real insight for building more diverse teams and a renewed sense of why diversity drives better decisions and outcomes.
Emese Pogácsás, Leadership Coach and Consultant, Namaste & Cabernet