89: Engineering Velocity for CTOs: How Superhuman Moves Fast Without Sacrificing Quality
The CTO PlaybookShow Notes
If your team feels busy but nothing meaningful gets delivered, this might explain why.
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.
Loïc Houssier, an engineering leader with two decades of experience across startups, scale-ups, and global companies, joins me today to explore how engineering velocity really works beyond output metrics.
We get into why decision-making speed is often a better indicator of performance than output, and how long feedback loops kill momentum, even in teams that look productive on the surface. You’ll hear how product-led SaaS organizations sustain speed without sacrificing quality, and why reducing the cycle from idea to impact matters more than optimizing coding time.
Loïc shares how career ladders and incentives shape behavior in ways most leaders overlook, along with a practical way to spot whether your team is truly fast or just performing speed. We also unpack how user empathy becomes a strategic advantage, not just a design principle.
If you’re trying to scale without losing control, this will change how you think about speed, decisions, and what actually drives results.
You’ll Learn:
[00:00] Introduction [8:52] Why velocity isn't really about writing code faster, and where the time is actually going [17:00] The costly mistake Loïc made at DocuSign that he'd still fix if he could go back [21:55] The career ladder is slowly shaping engineer behaviour, and most CTOs aren't using that deliberately enough [31:55] Moving fast without losing quality; what aligned autonomy looks like in practice, and the hiring filter that makes it possible [38:57] How Superhuman's founder uses game design thinking, a 100ms rule, and an 11-star standard to build experiences people actually feel
Save 4 hours every week with Superhuman Mail.
Find more from Loïc Houssier on LinkedIn.
Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, 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.
More from The CTO Playbook
Most leaders treat impostor syndrome as something they need to overcome. But what if the belief that you're not good enough is actually serving a purpose?
AI has made building software dramatically faster. The problem is that the rest of the engineering system hasn’t caught up. AI agents can now produce code, tests, documentation, migrations, and pull requests at a pace most engineering organisations weren’t designed to handle. But when everything around code review accelerates, review becomes the bottleneck. Pull requests pile up, reviewers spend more time reconstructing intent, and experienced engineers can end up reduced to repeatedly saying yes or sending work back for fixes.
AI adoption is getting easier for everyone. The harder question is whether you're using it to optimise the game you're already in, or to build a position that changes the game.
AI isn't just changing how engineers work. It's forcing technology leaders to rethink what makes management valuable.
Quantum computing may not be breaking your security today, but the decisions you make now could determine how exposed your organization is when it does. Conor Deegan explains why CTOs need to start preparing before Q Day arrives.