In this episode of Braintrust, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Randy Shoup, SVP of Engineering at Thrive Market. Randy shares lessons from his leadership roles across multiple companies and explains how measurement and transparency can help teams build stronger engineering cultures.

Randy and Ganesh chat about how fear can block progress, why recovery speed matters more than trying to prevent every failure, and how teams improve through steady, incremental gains. They also discuss a few practical ways to build trust around metrics so organizations can use visibility for learning instead of punishment.

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.

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta discusses the evolution of platform engineering with Kaspar von Grünberg, CEO and co-founder of Humanitec. Kaspar draws a sharp contrast between the "artisanal" method of software development and the industrialized approach required for modern enterprises. He argues that relying on individual heroes to "YOLO" their way through deployments is unsustainable, and that true scale demands standardized, reliable systems.

Ganesh and Kaspar unpack why standardization doesn't kill creativity, the critical difference between "rigid paths" and "Golden Paths," and why treating your platform as a product is non-negotiable. They also discuss the emerging role of AI, arguing that AI agents are effectively a new class of "junior engineer" that makes robust platforms more essential than ever.

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Nathen Harvey, who leads the DORA research program at Google Cloud. They dig into what really drives engineering excellence in the age of AI, why software delivery fundamentals matter more than ever, and why the best teams focus on improvement rather than benchmarks.

Ganesh and Nathen also discuss DORA's latest research into AI adoption, which found that AI acts as an amplifier, accelerates organizations with strong practices, and exposes dysfunction in those without. Nathen shares a few hard-won lessons from value stream mapping exercises that uncover invisible waste, explains why 30% distrust in AI might actually be healthy, and makes a compelling case for using this moment to finally drive the cultural changes teams have always wanted. Ganesh and Nathen also wrestle with the thorny question of what to actually measure when adopting AI tools and why lines of code is the wrong answer.