When do you stop being the CTO with all the answers and start being the one who asks better questions?
Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact.
Miguel Carranza built RevenueCat into critical infrastructure for thousands of mobile apps, and he'll tell you straight that he never wanted to be a manager.
He got his first computer at age eight and moved from Sevilla to Silicon Valley to build things. Somewhere along the way, he had to stop being the best engineer in the room and start hiring people better than him.
His worst hire is already on the team. That's not a red flag, it's the whole point of how he builds. The Office of the CTO, which he set up, exists precisely to keep that bar moving.
The engineering managers who never wanted the job are the ones who work out. The smallest pull requests have caused the biggest outages. And AI is making his teams smaller, not larger.
If you're a founder CTO trying to figure out when to delegate and when to dig in, this one will sit with you.
You'll Learn:
[00:00] Introduction
[01:12] From Sevilla to Silicon Valley: what drove Miguel to chase computers over everything else
[08:15] Building Elevate revealed a mobile subscription problem nobody had solved yet
[10:48] What changed Miguel’s mind when he doubted himself as a CTO
[17:16] Why engineering managers at RevenueCat must be ex-engineers first
[20:31] The mental model Miguel uses to hire people better than himself
[22:23] How AI is shrinking team sizes and who it benefits most
[29:45] The small internal team Miguel deploys to new bets and stuck projects
[35:49] The five rules Miguel refuses to bend on as an engineering leader
[42:01] Why RevenueCat's biggest outages came from one-line pull requests
[43:39] What actually makes RevenueCat's engineering culture distinct
Connect more with Miguel on X and the RevenueCat website.
Find more from Adam onLinkedIn andYouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.
