A few months ago, during a visit to Toronto, Vizz Web Solutions CEO Mudassir Abbas attended a CTO Craft conference. Unlike most tech events, CTO Craft was designed specifically for CTOs, technology leaders, and senior decision-makers. That made the discussions more practical, honest, and focused on real-world leadership challenges rather than general industry trends.
Why CTO Craft Feels Different
Most conferences are built for breadth. Founders, marketers, developers, investors, and product people are all mixed together, and the conversations naturally stay broad enough to make sense to everyone. CTO Craft took the opposite approach. Everyone in the room was dealing with the same category of problems: leading engineering teams, managing technical debt, translating business goals into technical decisions, and sitting at the table between founders and engineers.
That focus made the difference. Instead of small talk, people were comparing notes on real problems they were actively working through exactly the kind of practical, business-first thinking Vizz Web Solutions tries to bring to every client engagement.
Meeting Andy Skipper The Founder Behind CTO Craft
One of the highlights of the trip for Mudassir Abbas was meeting Andy Skipper, the founder of CTO Craft. Funnily enough, he met him over coffee before even realising who he was. They got talking, and Andy shared how CTO Craft started and how it has since grown into a global community with chapters running in different parts of the world.
What stayed with Mudassir Abbas wasn’t just the story of how the community grew. It was Andy’s personal commitment to it. He had flown in from Europe to Canada for only a few days, just to make sure the Toronto event ran well, before heading straight to the next CTO Craft gathering in another region.
That kind of dedication to a community he built is rare, and it says a lot about why the event felt genuine rather than corporate, a mindset that resonates strongly with how we approach its own client and community relationships.
AI Will Change What Engineers Work On
One of the sessions Mudassir Abbas keeps coming back to was about automation and AI. Engineers have always tried to automate repetitive work, and history has shown us something consistent:
- Automation does not replace people’s work completely.
- It allows people to focus on more complex and valuable problems.
- AI shifts work from repetitive tasks to higher-value thinking.
- The goal of automation is to improve productivity, not eliminate meaningful work.
The same pattern is expected to play out with AI. It may take over large parts of coding and other technical tasks, but that doesn’t mean people will have nothing left to do. It means the work shifts. New problems will surface, new opportunities will open up, and engineers will keep finding ways to create value, just in different places than before.
The Real Challenge- Managing Expectations With Non-Technical Founders
- Explaining how scope changes affect business goals leads to better decision-making.
- This is a common challenge for technical leaders across the industry.
- The discussion offered practical insights based on real-world experience.
- These conversations closely reflect how the Vizz Web Solutions team works with its own clients.
Execution Is Getting Cheaper, Judgement Getting Valuable
Another session made a point that stuck: the cost of execution is going down, while the value of good judgement is going up.
AI lets teams execute faster than ever before. But speed on its own doesn’t guarantee the right outcome. What matters more now is the ability to make good decisions with incomplete information, understand the second-order effects of a choice, figure out which problems are actually worth solving, and quickly tell which approaches will work and which won’t.
This is exactly where experienced technical leadership becomes more important, not less. AI can help teams move faster. Knowing where to go is still very much a human responsibility.
Rethinking Meetings: Fewer People, Clearer Outcomes
Mudassir Abbas also sat in on a session about consulting and running effective meetings, and it gave him a very practical takeaway. Not every meeting needs fifteen or twenty people in the room. Adding more people doesn’t automatically create more value. The right meeting has the right people in it: those who can actually make decisions, those with relevant expertise, and those directly affected by the outcome.
The most useful question to ask after any meeting is simple: did we make a decision, and does everyone know what they need to do next? If there’s no decision, no clear action, and no ownership.
- Every meeting should end with a clear decision.
- Everyone should know their next task before the meeting ends.
- Each action item should have a clear owner and deadline.
- If there is no decision or accountability, the meeting was likely just a discussion.
- Only invite people who genuinely need to be involved.
- Avoid including team members whose input is not required.
- Unnecessary meetings take people away from meaningful work.
- Time is one of an organization’s most valuable resources.
- Well-planned meetings improve productivity and respect everyone’s time.
The “AI Means 7x Faster” Trap
One theme Mudassir Abbas kept returning to after the conference was the growing assumption that because AI can generate code much faster, entire software projects should now be completed several times faster too. That’s a dangerous way to look at software development.
Yes, AI dramatically speeds up coding. But software development was never just about writing code. There’s requirements gathering, architecture, system design, testing, quality assurance, security, deployment, integrations, user feedback, debugging, and compliance and underneath all of it, there’s the work of actually understanding the business problem being solved.
- AI will speed up many routine tasks.
- Some projects will become more complex as teams build faster.
- Building the right product still requires experience and collaboration.
- Success is about creating the right solution, not just writing more code.
Technology Has to Be Grounded in Business Goals
If there’s one message Mudassir Abbas took away from CTO Craft, it’s that technology decisions can’t be separated from business goals. As CTOs and technology leaders, the job isn’t to adopt every new tool or build as fast as physically possible. The job is to keep asking:
- What problem are we actually solving?
- Why does this problem matter?
- What value will the solution create?
- What should we automate?
- What should we intentionally leave unchanged?
- How can we build scalable systems?
- How can we make systems adaptable?
- How do we ensure technology aligns with business goals?
That’s what made this conference genuinely valuable. It wasn’t just another technology event. It was a room full of people who are actually accountable for technology decisions, who lead engineering teams, manage shifting expectations, and constantly translate between the technical and business sides of a company.
Bringing These Lessons Back to Vizz Web Solutions
These conversations line up closely with how Vizz Web Solutions approaches building software for its clients. Whether it’s AI-powered development, custom software, or scalable web platforms, the same principle applies: speed only matters when it’s pointed at the right problem.
Good architecture, clear requirements, and sound judgement don’t get replaced by faster tooling if anything, they matter more once execution stops being the bottleneck. It’s this philosophy that continues to shape how we help founders and enterprises turn ideas into scalable, well-built digital products.
Conference Wrap Up
The conversations at CTO Craft were practical, the experiences were real, and the peer-to-peer learning was probably the biggest takeaway from the whole trip for Mudassir Abbas. He left Toronto with a lot of ideas still working themselves out, and even more questions to bring back to the Vizz Web Solutions team.
Thank you to the CTO Craft community and everyone met in Toronto for the conversations and the insights. Vizz Web Solutions hopes to be part of another CTO Craft gathering in the future.