80: Gut Instinct in Tech Leadership: When to Trust It, When to Challenge It

10 snips

Jan 27, 2026

They unpack gut instinct as experience compressed into quick pattern-matching signals. Real coaching stories show roadmap dilemmas, staged modernization choices, and when fast instincts saved or failed leaders. A practical three-question tool and a six-step playbook teach how to name, test, and train instincts without killing their speed. The conversation focuses on spotting weak domains, using data to validate feelings, and learning from retrospectives.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

CTO Who Stayed Silent And Paid

James felt a slow, heavy sense that the roadmap mix was wrong based on past failure.
He doubted his gut after a prior mistake and stayed silent, which led to missed deadlines and incidents.

INSIGHT

Gut Is Compressed Experience

Gut instinct is experience compressed into a fast pattern-matching signal.
It gives feelings like a tight chest or sinking feeling before conscious explanation arrives.

INSIGHT

Treat Gut Like A Cache

Treat your gut like a cached function: fast and often right but sometimes stale.
The cache excels when inputs match prior runs and fails when environment changes.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

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.

Your most powerful decision engine isn’t your data, your dashboards, or your AI, it’s your gut.

There is a topic that most technical leaders quietly wrestle with: gut instinct. Not as mysticism. Not as guesswork. But as a real decision-making tool for modern CTO leadership.

This episode is all about why your instincts are often your experience compressed into a feeling, when you should trust that signal, and when you absolutely shouldn’t. You’ll hear real coaching stories from seasoned CTOs navigating technical leadership, roadmap trade-offs, scaling engineering teams, and high-stakes calls where the data wasn’t enough.

We’ll talk about how engineering leadership changes when you treat instinct like a cached function, fast, powerful, but sometimes stale, and how to validate it without killing its speed. This episode is for startup and enterprise technology leaders who want sharper judgment, fewer regret-filled postmortems, and more confidence saying, “Something about this feels off, and here’s why.”

If you’ve ever ignored your gut and paid for it later, or trusted it blindly and been burned, this conversation will give you a practical way forward. It’s about building better instincts, not just better systems.

You’ll Learn:

[00:00] Introduction

[01:02] Why seasoned CTOs sense problems before they can explain them

[03:18] How ignoring gut signals leads to overcommitment and roadmap failure

[05:07] What gut instinct really is — experience compressed into a signal

[07:26] When instinct fails in new or emotionally charged situations

[09:41] How to spot where your instincts are strong, weak, or distorted

[12:12] Treating instinct like a cached function — fast but fallible

[16:34] Using gut instinct as a warning without turning it into dogma

[20:18] How data can validate instinct without slowing decisions

[24:47] A playbook for sharpening instinct under pressure

Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and check out Adam's CTO coaching company here.