“That was a really cool tech project and we learned a lot, but the impact that we had to the business was tremendous. We were able to scale, double the size of the business, double the revenue, and beat our competitors to market. That really shifted my mindset.”
“With the reference architecture, you’re starting with the capability of what the business needs and then plugging in the gaps around the tech.”
“Clients were trying to layer on AI on top of the tech that they had… spending millions of dollars and expecting amazing results, which was a hit or miss. The real transformation doesn’t start with AI.”
“There is no measure of experience that either the consumer is having or the employees are having… something as simple as the number of touchpoints in a workflow or a process is really interesting to look at.”
“That myth that you also see in startups and scaleups is that technical excellence equals operational excellence. And it does not.”
“The biggest impact for AI is what it does for you quietly, not things that you need to talk about. It just does the work for you.”
Host: Lucas Hendrich, CTO at Forte Group
Guest: Ro Mohindroo, founder at Digit; former CTO, CIO and CDIO
Lucas Hendrich: Welcome to the CTO to CTO podcast, where chief technology officers dig into the challenges and opportunities leaders face every day at the intersection of business and innovation. I'm your host, Lucas Hendrich, CTO at Forte Group.
Today it's a great pleasure to have Ro Mohindroo with us to talk about her experience and her journey. Correct me if I'm wrong: she's currently working with Digit, a consulting company, advising startup CTOs. You've been a CIO, a CDO or CDIO, and you started your career many years ago writing code.
We're breaking tradition a bit. Usually this is CTO to CTO, but because you advise CTOs, I think you'll have a very interesting perspective. To start, tell me a little about what you're doing right now.
Ro Mohindroo: Thank you for having me, Lucas. Right now I'm working with Digit, a company I founded a few years ago with my husband. I provide advisory and consulting services to startup CEOs and CTOs, particularly around what it takes to scale the company.
Startups are notorious for getting the job done — or getting it started, I should say. But continuing that journey and scaling the company requires a lot more than just the tech. That's what my past experience brings to the table.
Lucas Hendrich: That leads to my first question. I think everyone who works in technology reaches a point where they go from understanding the technology deeply to understanding the business levers. It requires ramping up on financial intelligence and how markets work, and it's interesting how people make that transition. Sometimes it's formal, like supplementing with an MBA. Sometimes — as in my case — it's purely practical experience. When was the moment in your career when your vision shifted, or was amplified, from technology solutions to actually moving the needle for the business?
Ro Mohindroo: I love that question, because it made me pause, think about that moment, and really appreciate when it happened. It was when I was CTO at LinkShare, which was acquired by Rakuten and is now Rakuten Affiliate Network. It was a startup when I joined, so I experienced that journey from startup to scale-up.
After the Rakuten acquisition, our aspiration was to grow the business globally. This was pre-cloud, when data centers were very much a thing. Growing the business meant reducing in-country latency, which meant setting up new data centers — as you and your audience know, not a small task.
Fast-forward: the platform had a lot of scaling challenges, and cloud was just arriving on the scene. From a technology perspective, it made a lot of sense to move our platform to AWS and redesign the data fabric holding it together, so we could have a distributed architecture. It was an awesome project to take on, and very, very high risk.
We got it done, and the impact made me pause. As a business, we were able to double in size, double our revenue, and beat our competitors to market in the countries we moved into. That was my moment. I thought: yes, that was a really cool tech project and we learned a lot, but the impact on the business was tremendous. That really shifted my mindset.
Lucas Hendrich: When I've been involved in similar initiatives, there's an incredible sense of leverage. It starts from thinking mostly about risk, and then you see the huge gains. How has that changed now that cloud has become more expensive, and there's a different race for compute with AI and GPUs? How are you advising your startup CTOs to navigate that now?
Ro Mohindroo: As technology leaders, we're expected to know technology; otherwise we wouldn't be technology leaders. So my focus is more on making sure clients' CTOs and CEOs actually understand the business, and how to apply technology to improve it — or, in a startup's case, to grow it.
It's very easy — and I'm guilty of this too — to get into your own little world and be awed by all the tech around you, because it's awesome and fun. But applying it in the business world can be quite different. The push I give my clients is: the tech is really cool, but what business problem are we trying to solve?
Lucas Hendrich: What KPIs do you use as heuristics for that?
Ro Mohindroo: In startups you have stakeholders, VCs, and people investing in your company, so dollars are always important. At the end of the day, you're a business because you're in it to make money; even nonprofits have a value KPI.
And in this day and age, I was going to say speed, but it's really about agility. How quickly can you adapt to what's happening around you? And do you have the capability to think differently about how to apply the tech?
Lucas Hendrich: I totally agree. Ten years ago, time to market was the problem to solve. Now we're in a moment of a lot of uncertainty, and it's harder to make bets on architecture. I know this is tricky, but what's an example of how you'd foster agility in a startup today, versus ten years ago, when it was just a race to get as many users onto the platform as possible?
Ro Mohindroo: It's been an interesting learning experience for me too: thinking not just in terms of architecture, but in terms of reference architecture. In my experience, the distinction is that reference architecture lets you connect the tech to the business and its capabilities. You start with the capabilities the business needs, then fill in the gaps with tech.
That's something I learned along the way, and it's what I try to bring to my clients. Again, it tests whether you actually understand the business. Then, when the capabilities the business needs change, you can look at it and say, "That means we collectively need to make this change." Working with the business is very important: shifting the mindset from "I'm working for the business" to "I'm working with the business."
Lucas Hendrich: I like that a lot, and I like how that approach forces you to think small.
Ro Mohindroo: Yes, because then you can move faster.
Lucas Hendrich: Exactly. The problems you're solving are more discrete, and you have reference architecture to solve them. By its very nature, that keeps you fairly agnostic, because you're not going all in on a large distributed architecture.
Ro Mohindroo: It is challenging, though, because you want a vision. As a member of the executive team or a company founder, you have a vision for your company, and it's usually very big. On the technology side, leaders tend to be eager to get there. We're thinking ahead, which is what we're paid to do, but we need to execute in smaller pieces.
Lucas Hendrich: I agree. And I think it's easy for us as technology leaders to be distracted by the technology and treat it as the goal or the KPI.
Ro Mohindroo: Yes.
Lucas Hendrich: How frequently we can release to production only makes sense in a business context.
Ro Mohindroo: Yes, yes.
Lucas Hendrich: This wasn't a question I sent you in advance, but I'll throw it out now, because I was thinking about your journey and it's a frequent topic on this podcast. The CTO role is multidisciplinary by default. If you take the view that business guides technology, not the other way around, and business is incredibly diverse, then being a CTO can mean a million different things depending on where you are.
Add the titles CIO, CDO, and CDIO, and now the hybrid Chief Product and Technology Officer, which I think is probably where things are heading, because it aligns you even more closely with the business. When you explain it to young people — in my case, my kids asking what I do — how would you distinguish chief digital, chief information, and chief technology officer? What makes the difference in the title?
Ro Mohindroo: I think titles mattered in the past, but they're converging. I've also been a field CTO and a field CIO, and those roles are definitely converging. It's more about what the business needs and which hat you're wearing that day.
Historically, CTOs have focused on the technology itself. CIOs have focused on what the business needs to operate day to day and what technology supports that. The digital role was always a bit of a question mark, but in today's climate, the forward-thinking CIOs and CTOs who are moving the needle on business transformation tend to be called CDIOs. Then there are the field versions, which work with client CTOs and CIOs to implement the technology solutions you've brought to market.
The distinction between focusing on the field and focusing internally on building the company's infrastructure still exists, but those roles are blending, particularly as some of those capabilities can be handled by AI. You don't really need four roles in the organization. What you do need is the operational maturity to do it well, so that when the roles are merged, they don't overwhelm the individual and can be effective as a combined role.
Lucas Hendrich: So it becomes more about delegating responsibilities — who's responsible for moving what?
Ro Mohindroo: A little, but I think it's also about really questioning how you operate as a company, and whether it's effective. Historically, companies have stuck with traditional KPIs, and it's time to revisit whether those KPIs really serve the business.
Lucas Hendrich: Tell me more about that.
Ro Mohindroo: I think there's a trend toward value-based KPIs. Yes, you can measure operational KPIs from a tech perspective — uptime was always a big one, along with latency, performance, and so on. But there's no measure of the experience the consumer or the employees are having.
Traditionally, when people talk about experience, you hear about employee engagement surveys, NPS, and things of that nature. But I have yet to find a metric that actually measures the end-to-end experience of the consumer or the employee.
Lucas Hendrich: That's a tricky one.
Ro Mohindroo: It is.
Lucas Hendrich: And it's often survey-based, and surveys are anecdotal. There isn't a really good objective measure.
Ro Mohindroo: Yes.
Lucas Hendrich: It's interesting. In the nonprofit world, the focus is on outcomes — having a fairly direct impact on outcomes — though the operating model is completely different. I wonder whether there's something outcome-based there.
Ro Mohindroo: I think it probably builds on outcomes, but with a deeper understanding of how work actually gets done, and then measuring what it takes to get it done. Typically you'd measure, say, the number of invoices paid. Historically, you don't look at how long it takes to pay an invoice, the number of steps in that workflow, the overhead, the number of people involved, the system and data touch points, and the complexity in the environment. Something as simple as the number of touch points in a workflow or process is really interesting to look at.
Lucas Hendrich: That gets to another question. Often the first generation of an AI implementation is, as I think you've described it, surface-level, while a deeper transformation needs to happen to make a real impact — one that may not even start with AI. Tell me about your view on that.
Ro Mohindroo: About ten years ago, I spent some time with two conversational AI companies, a startup and a scale-up. This was pre-generative AI.
Lucas Hendrich: That's interesting. Who remembers that?
Ro Mohindroo: It was an amazing experience, because even back then, clients were trying to layer AI on top of the tech they had for call centers, service desks, and websites. They were spending millions of dollars on the technology and expecting amazing results, and it was hit or miss.
That goes back to what happens when you layer technology on top of broken systems, broken processes, and — I'd go as far as saying — broken people. I think people are exhausted by the amount of change in the workplace and the number of things they need to keep up with. So when you add another piece of technology on top, whether AI or anything else, the outcomes aren't what you expect.
Lucas Hendrich: The word "dystopian" comes to mind.
Ro Mohindroo: For sure. But the aspirations and expectations are much higher. It's always fascinating to me: we're doing the same thing but expecting different results.
Lucas Hendrich: Yes.
Ro Mohindroo: We know what that's the definition of.
Lucas Hendrich: That's fascinating. Ten years ago it was what they now call classical AI, which makes me think of the Renaissance or something.
Ro Mohindroo: Yes.
Lucas Hendrich: And you're talking millions; now we're talking billions spent on generative AI. I just read something in Fortune yesterday saying 95% of generative AI projects or prototypes in the enterprise aren't going anywhere.
Ro Mohindroo: Yes.
Lucas Hendrich: That isn't a huge surprise. But why isn't it? It sounds like it's following that trend.
Ro Mohindroo: Those of us who've been there before have seen the pattern. Back when we did the cloud migration at Rakuten, it was the same thing. Everybody wanted to move to the cloud, but cloud migrations weren't always successful. You'd get there or not for various reasons. You didn't redesign the platform; you just lifted and shifted. Then you got there and realized, "Oh, this is really expensive. Now we need FinOps and a bunch of other things." I think it's the same pattern repeating itself, just faster.
Lucas Hendrich: Which is good in a sense, because we're learning faster.
Ro Mohindroo: Are we?
Lucas Hendrich: Well, one hopes. We can take the optimistic view.
Lucas Hendrich: There are many contrasts between startups and enterprises, and you've navigated both successfully. What is it about large enterprises that causes this phenomenon of going all in, spending, and not getting the outcomes you'd expect?
Ro Mohindroo: In my experience, it's the persistent operating model of working in silos. Large enterprises want big outcomes, but they're not connecting the dots. One thing I find very exciting about working with smaller companies is that the dots connect, because there are fewer of them.
The challenge comes when you go from startup to scale-up: the number of dots multiplies, and you face the same challenge as enterprises. I think the difference between a scale-up and an enterprise is that in an enterprise, people stop trying to connect the dots. One area that really intrigues me is whether we reward people for connecting the dots, or for staying within their silo.
Lucas Hendrich: The whole question of incentives is very interesting: the behavior you expect versus the behavior you actually get. One of my favorite books is Only the Paranoid Survive, and I think it's discussed there; I also know Daniel Kahneman discusses it in Thinking, Fast and Slow.
If you're a CEO, you need a management layer. You can't have thousands of direct reports — maybe 70 if you're the CEO of Nvidia. So there's this phenomenon where you're trying to promote a culture of risk-taking, yet in the enterprise there's really no reward for taking risks. Quite the contrary. Have you seen ways to sustain that incentive to take risks in larger organizations?
Ro Mohindroo: In my experience at larger organizations — and I thought Rakuten in particular did it really well — we carved out days when the team could work on whatever they wanted. Back then it was usually Fridays, because that didn't conflict with release nights.
Over time, that evolved into asking how to connect an idea to the company's larger vision. Whether or not it succeeded was another story, but if it connected to the vision and helped advance one of our key initiatives, that was rewarded and became part of the performance management process.
That's the exciting part. In a startup or scale-up, you can try those things and see what makes sense for your culture and company. In larger companies, you tend to stop doing that, or you create an innovation lab stashed away somewhere. That lab operates like a startup and then has the same scaling problems startups do, because it eventually has to come back and connect to the bigger picture.
Lucas Hendrich: I also think that as you grow into an enterprise, you accumulate a lot of technical debt. Some people may enjoy working on it, but typically it's not the most innovative work. It's harder to connect to revenue because it's usually the drudgery. Maybe we need to be better at incentivizing that kind of work; otherwise it can also create a silo effect.
Ro Mohindroo: But I think there is a way to connect it to the larger business vision. I find it hard to believe you'd spend that much time, energy, and money on things that don't support the business. If you are, you should question why it's being done at all.
Think about uptime, platform performance, data movement, and so on. Those things matter to the business. They aren't done because technologists felt like doing them. But maybe those foundational things are also where the appetite for risk is lower.
Lucas Hendrich: I also think the distance between your work and the customer grows almost exponentially as an organization grows. If someone had contact with the customer, they'd inherently understand the value proposition. The challenge is that at that scale, you may not hear from happy customers.
Ro Mohindroo: This came out of my experience as a field CTO: ask the question. I think people in tech can be a bit more curious beyond their own boundaries. If this system went down, what would the impact be? Would a sales or customer service rep be knocking on my door?
I don't have to ask the customer directly — that would actually be embarrassing. But you can ask people in those roles within the organization what the impact would be. That really helps connect the dots too.
Lucas Hendrich: I think a challenge is understanding — going back to your original insight — how what you do day to day connects to the growth and mission of the business, and whether that's well articulated. What's the company's North Star? What is it ultimately trying to achieve? That can get diluted over time, especially with growth by acquisition and differing visions, and you can become a cog in the wheel.
Ro Mohindroo: But be a curious cog.
Lucas Hendrich: A curious cog, yes.
Lucas Hendrich: You've been writing a series for Reworked — tell us a bit about what Reworked is. You've focused on the employee experience and what you call the employee experience paradox. I'm really curious about that, and I think our listeners will be too.
Ro Mohindroo: Reworked is a publication from Simpler Media Group focused on the future of work and the employee experience, which in my opinion is a neglected topic in tech circles. I've subscribed for many years. Last year I connected with the editor about writing a series; a lot of great pieces get published there, and my passion was to take all my experience with the employee experience back to the audience and suggest a different approach to it.
It turned into a five-part series that just concluded this month, and it was super fun to work with the team at Reworked. I've been passionate about this topic for years, so it was really gratifying to see it come to fruition.
Lucas Hendrich: Tell me more. What are tech leaders not acknowledging about the employee experience? What is the paradox?
Ro Mohindroo: I think it's more than tech leaders. I don't think CEOs or even boards are acknowledging that the employee experience is poor. We hear a lot about it from employees, and we suffer from it ourselves as employees, but it's neglected at the very top. Nobody is talking about it at the board level.
AI has shifted the conversation a bit in some circles, but not enough. I think we're still over-indexing on the consumer and customer experience, which also needs to be challenged, because it continues to be poor. I'm sure each of us can cite examples of our day-to-day experiences as consumers and customers. So if millions, even billions, are being spent on customer experience, why do I as a consumer and customer keep having the experiences I have?
Lucas Hendrich: There seems to be a problem quantifying that deadweight loss. Everyone is capable of contributing a certain amount, and we're not getting the contribution we could be. The response right now might be, "Maybe we need to replace the human in the loop." You hear that constantly, and it works against any kind of engagement.
Ro Mohindroo: Even if we can replace the human in the loop, we're still providing a service to someone. Say we're providing it to other agents, bots, or robots. They'll still have expectations — and I think robots will be less accepting than we humans are of the experience. There's still an expectation that the dots connect, and today they just don't.
I'm not sure that's a technology failure. The tech exists to connect the dots; we're just not taking the time to do it, or we're misjudging which dots need connecting and which don't. Just because there are dots doesn't mean they all need to be connected.
Lucas Hendrich: Where I see a lot of this is in talent acquisition. When employees' experience degrades, that also shows up as missed opportunities with people. You introduce AI into talent acquisition and it looks more efficient, but I think we're still missing opportunities.
At different moments, companies need people with a certain diversity of skills. Some are amazing at one thing and terrible at another. But there's a generalist view — a kind of recommended daily allowance of talent people are expected to have — that pushes everything toward the mean, rather than looking for what someone actually does well, enjoys, and is motivated to do. What's an example of where you see companies really failing at employee engagement?
Ro Mohindroo: Oh, so many. My pet peeve from an employee experience perspective is onboarding and offboarding, but also the day-to-day lived experience of something like the help desk or service desk you provide to employees. That experience boggles my mind. I've seen it as a CIO providing the service and as an employee consuming it. It isn't intentional, but the experience is very fragmented and just not pleasant, and it's been the same since I started my career.
Lucas Hendrich: Yes.
Ro Mohindroo: You submit a ticket. It may or may not get addressed. Eventually it gets closed, someone pesters you for a thumbs up or thumbs down, and everyone goes away. And now there are conversational AI solutions that say, "Let's make the ticketing process a conversation." Why am I having a conversation about a ticket? Is that really the best use of company talent?
Lucas Hendrich: Yes.
Ro Mohindroo: And of time and resources? That always fascinates me. When I start an engagement, it's one of the first things that jumps out at me: "Hmm, that was an interesting experience."
Lucas Hendrich: Yes.
Ro Mohindroo: And people just don't discuss it.
Lucas Hendrich: So what's the next step? What would utopia look like?
Ro Mohindroo: When I've been in the provider role, I've always asked my teams: Why does someone need to open a ticket in the first place? That prompts thinking about whether it could be self-service. But taken too far, self-service just pushes the problem back to the user. So why are we having these problems at all?
Lucas Hendrich: Mm-hmm.
Ro Mohindroo: I'm not sure we ask that question enough as technologists.
Lucas Hendrich: So, shifting left.
Ro Mohindroo: Yes. Why does it happen, and what do I need to do to make it go away — not just push it back a step, but make it go away entirely? That may mean changing the operating model.
Lucas Hendrich: Right. But if you can't see over the wall into the next cubicle, it's hard to know.
Ro Mohindroo: Or you're not asking the question. Sometimes, just to get through the day, you don't engage in that conversation.
Lucas Hendrich: Absolutely.
Lucas Hendrich: That leads to the next question: What's something in tech that you think really sucks — a pet peeve? The help desk may be one, but what else would you point to?
Ro Mohindroo: The help desk is definitely one, and not just the IT help desk. You have similar experiences calling customer service, where people just pass the buck. If you're a patient calling to check on test results, you go around in circles.
Lucas Hendrich: Yes.
Ro Mohindroo: There are a lot of frustrating experiences like that. But the help desk one is ironic to me, because it's tech people creating that experience and not questioning its value.
Ro Mohindroo: The other big one for me is digital literacy at the executive and board levels. I think the gap has grown wider and wider as technology moves at an unprecedented pace, and we're not doing enough to educate.
The board's solution is, "Let's put a technologist on the board," or give the CTO or CIO a seat on the executive team. But that's where it ends. A lot of soundbites and headlines get passed around, but the depth of digital literacy doesn't go beyond that. Meanwhile, the middle managers and leads do know the subject. For me, that gap keeps getting wider.
Lucas Hendrich: I think that creates a certain animosity at the enterprise level, which goes right back to your point about employee experience: "What is it they're not getting?"
Ro Mohindroo: I think that's why many companies, big and small, struggle when you ask who owns the employee experience. You often hear, "The CHRO owns it." Well, no.
Lucas Hendrich: It's the CFO, tracking opex.
Ro Mohindroo: Or the CFO. You hardly ever hear that it's the CEO, with an experience metric reported to the board. Just as we report a cybersecurity dashboard to the board, it would be awesome to see an experience dashboard. It should include things like how long it actually takes to get things done.
Lucas Hendrich: To become productive.
Ro Mohindroo: Yes — which workflow in your organization takes the longest.
Lucas Hendrich: I find it interesting that in a tech-enabled company — and you could argue most companies have to be, to some degree — any internal R&D or software development seems to be the nucleus where that experience could improve. It's the first area to adopt Agile methodologies, there's a lot of curiosity, and you get instant gratification when you design something, test it, deploy it, and it works.
It's interesting how that doesn't necessarily carry over to other parts of the organization. As the organization grows and those other parts become necessary, it's hard — to your point — to connect the dots between what you're doing, what you're tasked with, and the value it creates.
Ro Mohindroo: I think that's the myth you see in startups moving to scale-ups: that technical excellence equals operational excellence.
Lucas Hendrich: Yes.
Ro Mohindroo: It does not.
Lucas Hendrich: Yes.
Ro Mohindroo: Operational excellence absolutely needs investment. If you want to operate at that level, you have to invest in it. It won't happen just because you have brilliant people around the table getting a product out.
At the end of the day, success is measured by revenue: how customers and the market receive your product, how you service it, how you recognize revenue, how long it takes to close your books every month, and so on. Having brilliant people doesn't guarantee you'll operate the business at that level. That disconnect is one I see often.
Lucas Hendrich: Absolutely. That's really well put.
Lucas Hendrich: Last question, which I'm stealing from another podcast I listen to — those who know, know the game. Tell me what you believe is underrated right now in AI, and what's overrated. By AI I mean the full spectrum: generative AI, automation, all of it. What's overblown, overrated, or distracting, and what has a ton of promise?
Ro Mohindroo: I'd say what's overrated is the general-intelligence, conversational capability. That seems to be the surface-level thing everyone thinks they'll put in place. Using things like Copilot is considered "using AI." To me, that's simply how you should be running your business. The tech is available; if it benefits your business, use it. So that's overrated and very surface-level.
Lucas Hendrich: Like a magic bullet.
Ro Mohindroo: I think people are doing those things just so they can say they're doing AI, whereas it should be table stakes. If new tech comes out and benefits your business, you should always have the mindset and operating model to experiment and, if it makes sense, educate your employees and lift them up to take advantage of it.
Ro Mohindroo: What's probably underrated is the impact it can actually have on your business, particularly in the back office and on how work actually gets done. Sadly, that requires understanding how your business works day to day. But I think that's really underrated.
One of my favorite quotes, from way back, is from Jeff Bezos, who said, roughly, that the biggest impact of AI is what it does for you quietly in the background. Not the things you need to talk about — it just does the work for you.
Lucas Hendrich: Yes.
Ro Mohindroo: And I think that can be true of any technology you bring to the table.
Lucas Hendrich: I totally agree. It becomes ubiquitous; it becomes a tool. I agree that talk of superintelligence or AGI is distracting, and I don't think the benchmarks around it are really relevant. Every day you read that some model passed some benchmark, and they're so far removed from any KPI or benchmark that's immediately relevant. One example: you'd expect AI to affect GDP.
Ro Mohindroo: Yes.
Lucas Hendrich: Right?
Ro Mohindroo: It hasn't yet.
Lucas Hendrich: It probably will.
Ro Mohindroo: Yes.
Lucas Hendrich: I think it probably will, but through tool adoption, to your point, not through something mythical or magical. That's the other human problem: we love to anthropomorphize machines and imagine we're creating some kind of consciousness, when at the end of the day we're creating digital experiences whose consumers are still humans.
Ro Mohindroo: Yes. And to the earlier point, maybe agents will eventually consume some of those services, and their expectations will be higher.
Lucas Hendrich: Yes.
Ro Mohindroo: Because computers aren't very forgiving. Tech isn't very forgiving.
Lucas Hendrich: Not at all. Higher, and totally different. It requires a degree of clarity; LLMs don't handle ambiguity well at all. It's funny, given what I just said, but I'll admit I thank Claude when I'm particularly pleased. Just in case — a little insurance.
Ro Mohindroo: Gartner recently published a piece on the role technology is playing, which fascinated me. It suggested the shift may be from treating technology as a tool to treating it as a teammate, colleague, or partner. I found that really interesting, because throughout my career it's always been a tool. Thinking of it as a partner was an interesting concept.
Lucas Hendrich: When you have a dialogue with a person, a chatbot, or anything that can respond, the dialogue often just reflects your original question or insight back to you. I like that having a sounding board lets us iterate faster on our ideas.
One of my favorite uses of generative AI — and I'd call it slightly underrated right now, though I think it's taking off wildly — is vibe coding. I can create an interface so quickly, with so little toil and setup, and my product idea immediately changes. I'm already at the second-order version of what I thought I wanted: "That's great, but what if I could do this instead?" Breaking free of that loop will be a great accelerator of value, but I think we're still a ways from it.
Lucas Hendrich: Ro, it's been wonderful having you on the podcast. I really appreciate it.
Ro Mohindroo: Likewise. Thank you so much.
Lucas Hendrich: That's it for this episode. Join us next time for more real-world conversations between technology leaders. And if you liked what you heard, subscribe to CTO to CTO. See you soon.