Jeff Schnitter, Solution Architect at Cortex and former developer experience leader at Workday, joins Ganesh Datta to explore why changing engineering culture requires starting with pain points rather than jumping to solutions. Jeff shares his experience shifting from a standardization mindset to an outcomes-based approach, the critical lesson that software development is "more faith-based than tech-based," and why new employees are uniquely valuable for questioning the status quo.

Fred Mare, a principal engineer at Xero, joins Ganesh Datta to explore why production readiness should be framed around the customer experience rather than internal operational concerns. Fred shares Xero's approach to confidence scores—a signal that aggregates quality metrics, change size, and test coverage to predict the impact of any deployment on end users.

Fred and Ganesh discuss criticality tiering based on customer jobs to be done, why automation is essential to avoid overloading engineering teams, the inseparable relationship between security and production readiness, and why the best advice for starting a production readiness program is to start small and treat it as a journey.

This week, 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.