Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Jeff Schnitter, a Solution Architect at Cortex. Jeff shares insights from his time as a Senior Principal Engineer at Workday, where he led developer experience and release engineering, to explore how organizations can successfully shift their internal culture.

The discussion covers the transition from a "Stockholm Syndrome" mindset where teams accept broken processes to a culture of reliability and security. Ganesh and Jeff also dive into the importance of incentives, the role of leadership in empowering teams, and why the most effective transformations start with identifying individual pain points rather than issuing top-down mandates.

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Fred Mare, Principal Engineer at Xero in Melbourne, Australia. They explore what production readiness really means, why it should be framed around customer impact rather than internal processes, and how to build a sustainable program without overwhelming your engineering teams.

Fred also shares how Xero thinks about confidence scores for changes, why production readiness is a continuous journey rather than a one-time gate, and the importance of automating as much as possible to keep engineers focused on what matters most. The conversation also covers how AI coding assistance fits into production readiness, why security can't be separated from operational excellence, and Fred's best advice for engineering leaders just starting to build a production readiness program.