Fractional CTO Jack Godau on AI Layoffs, Product Engineers & the CPTO Myth
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J Jack Godau · Fractional CTO, VRR Consulting

Fractional CTO Jack Godau on AI Layoffs, Product Engineers & the CPTO Myth

S05E05August 24, 2026 59:37

AI is getting blamed for a wave of layoffs across tech — but is that actually true? Our guest Jack Godau, a fractional CTO who steps into organizations when something has fundamentally broken down, doesn't buy it. If AI can genuinely make a team ten times more effective, he argues, firing people instead of putting that to use makes no sense.

Ghonche and Paul talk with Jack about what's really driving the layoffs, why calling someone a "product engineer" doesn't automatically give them product skills, and how a five-person team ended up owning two hundred repositories and eighty-nine microservices that nobody understood anymore.

We also dig into vision, values and culture as a company scales, why hackathons only work with real leadership buy-in, and whether product and tech should ever merge into a single CPTO role — or whether that's the wrong idea entirely.

Follow Jack on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-godau/

Follow Product and Cake: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-and-cake-podcast

J

Jack Godau

Fractional CTO

VRR Consulting