Every end of the year, I sit down to do some personal reviews, as well as collect my notes. Since I have hundreds of meetings with founders and tech leaders worldwide every year, looking at it all from a higher altitude helps me notice themes and trends. This year, I decided to share those that I think are widely relevant. Yes, a good chunk are AI-related, but not all!

CTOs are CEOs’ Nightmare

To be frank, CTOs were always a double-edged sword. They could dramatically accelerate things, or become a gigantic anchor. Yet 2025 was the year when I had heard a record number of startup founders lament not understanding what the F&%$ their CTO was up to. They hired people they thought were stars, only to quickly realize they were just really good at interviewing.

Or, they were pleased with their tech team and were almost paralyzed from the fear of offending the senior tech leaders, knowing it could easily impact months of the roadmap if these people were to leave (or worse, “quiet quit”).

Especially true when the engineering executives aren’t cofounders, CEOs often feel like they cannot risk being 100% candid, which affects the whole company. As a coach, this is something I naturally notice and help clients fix, but for so many, there’s the impression that this is just the way “things ought to be.” Nope.

Good CTOs Have Sky as the Limit

Relatedly, when CTOs know how to communicate well and collaborate with their peers in the executive team, the world is their oyster. This was true in previous years, but one of the positive benefits of GenAI is that it has made virtually everyone in tech more open to changes, experimentation, and adopting new and experimental approaches.

That in turn makes it much easier for good CTOs to find growth opportunities and add value all over the company. Whereas previously this would translate into political battles, most executives are now looking for these collaborations. That makes the life of a good CTO that much easier. Reach out and seize the opportunity!

Experience is Overvalued

Because things are changing tremendously, a lot of what we have learned to rely on might no longer be relevant. That’s hard, because senior leaders usually get to that position precisely due to their gaining experience and wielding it. Now, some of that experience might actually hold them back.

It was never the case that we could say we have nothing more to learn. But now, it feels almost ridiculous. That means that everyone, not just ICs, ought to be investing regular time in reviewing what is working out. Experimenting all over again. I cannot stress enough how important it is to don a beginner’s mind all over again. While not all of your experience should be tossed aside, a good chunk deserves reviewing. Get curious.

Coaching is Getting Rarer

There’s a reason I released the Impact Coaching Framework ebook at the start of the year (available for free here). Speaking to many leaders around the time, it was a glaring gap in many a CTO’s toolbox.

Whereas many senior leaders have started working with coaches, which is a good thing, it seems that the change is also making them think that one is either a coach or not. That’s not so. You can and should coach your team. Only by doing that will you get better and will your team continue growing.

Personally, I oppose the notion of external coaches taking the responsibility of coaching from the managers in the organization. Senior leaders working with a coach should be used to help them bring coaching into their organization, not abdicate on it. So even if you bring an external expert for group coaching, for example, that doesn’t mean those people should not have effective one-on-ones with their managers.

Not Enough Deliberate Work

The previous point is perhaps a specific example of this wider issue. We allow ourselves to drift as leaders, not forming a coherent “playbook” that we believe in. Whereas playbooks have been one of the core questions for interviewing senior leaders (asking them to explain their general theory for their role and how they manage it), the responses seem to be getting vaguer and vaguer every month.

Wake up. Take the time to decide what sort of leader you want to be. Consider what your responsibility is. Where you will be driving impact. What indicators will you focus on to assert your progress. Without doing those, you’re not actually taking the lead.

Clean Code is Going Away?

As someone who used to walk around with a clean code armband, I find this extremely awkward. The GenAI changes to the landscape of software development make it so that people aren’t focusing on how the code looks anymore. Crafting code is no longer worth the time, it seems. At least not during writing (when we end up needing to debug the code, sometimes even the machine can’t explain well what it had in mind, and clean code shines).

What I see taking its place is clean architecture. Engineers are shifting more and more to giving higher resolution directions to their agents and not stressing too much about the code itself as long as it seems to work.

Product Engineers are Changing

One of my most popular articles ever is about having fewer principal engineers and more product engineers. That was about engineers who focus on the product itself, understanding the business and the users’ needs. A few years have passed, and this has doubled in importance.

However, product engineers now are different. Given that teams can move much faster, I see many lament that product managers cannot keep up. While I assume the industry will continue to come up with ways to aid them, too, I think the engineers ought to step up. They can be involved in many of these decisions and experiments and help their product counterparts work on the areas that are most critical or highest leverage.

Software “Corners” Get Rarified

Where people are relying more on agents for their day-to-day coding, these tools have glaring holes in areas that they weren’t trained enough on. I’m seeing teams realizing that their moats and advantages get deeper in those areas without them having to do anything.

However, the other side of the coin is that these areas are also harder to hire for. Personally, I think that software engineers who choose a niche can set themselves up for a very interesting career that will be more “AI-proof” than others.

It also means that those who create abstractions and frameworks are getting rarer. Like people are questioning whether React will be the “last web framework” because now humans will no longer write code by hand, I think that those who are still coming up with new paradigms and concepts to manage software are going to be rare but priceless. GitHub will be filled with stupid projects, making the actually good ones more valuable.

Junior Engineers Have an Advantage

Related to the over-reliance on experience, I’m seeing some junior engineers adopting AI tools much more naturally than some senior ones. Perhaps it’s because they aren’t already too set in their ways to change course faster.

This is particularly interesting given the earlier lamentations that expected LLMs to make juniors obsolete. That’s far from the truth, at least for those relentless juniors who are curious, hungry, and seeking to learn things fast.

The AI Experiment-Exploit Cycles

One of my clients this year went over the course of a few months from barely any AI adoption to getting so much out of it that it has completely transformed their product roadmap. They essentially pivoted without formally saying so. The interesting part is that this was the result of a combined effort, both top-down but also bottom-up.

While the CEO knew that something would have to change, it was only after we worked on the team’s AI literacy and started running experiments that it was possible to find these areas to double down on. That’s what I’m seeing in general with AI: cycles where teams experiment with a specific tool, approach, or process and, if they find it valuable, exploit it by systemizing the thing. Don’t assume you can have a single AI hackathon and be set.

Wishing you a happy and remarkable 2026! And if you want someone to help ensure you grow faster, reach out.