In this CTO Series episode, Daniel Harcek shares how leading engineering teams across radically different scales — from a 7-person fintech startup to a 2,000-person cybersecurity company — taught him that leadership isn't one-size-fits-all. We explore how he builds AI-first organizations, drives agile transformations, and why he believes every person in a company should think like a tech person.

What Works at 10 People Breaks at 100

"Leadership is contextual, not absolute. What works with 10 people breaks at 50, at 100."

Daniel's career spans from building a 30-person team for a German startup out of Žilina, Slovakia, to leading 70 engineers at Avast's mobile division within a 2,000-person organization, and now running a 7-person team at WageNow. Each scale demanded a fundamentally different approach. At smaller scales, you strip away operational overhead and push ownership directly to the people. At larger scales, you need guardrails, dedicated roles, and structured processes that the smaller team would find suffocating. The lesson: don't carry your playbook from one context to another — rebuild it for the reality you're in.

End-to-End Ownership Replaces Specialized Roles

"Each engineer owns quality for the task he delivers. And he owns the fact that it comes to production."

At WageNow, Daniel runs without dedicated QA people — in a fintech company where quality can't be compromised. Instead, each developer owns quality end-to-end, from code to production. This isn't recklessness; it's intentional design. When teams are small, you set up the system so that it's safe to break things, then trust people with hard tasks. The result: people grow faster, move faster, and care more about what they ship. In larger organizations, you might need specialized DevOps, QA, and platform roles — but the principle of ownership stays the same.

The Buddy System and Scaling Without Losing Alignment

"The buddy system is one of the easiest things you can do. One buddy for a newcomer for the first 1, 3, 6 months — they often become friends."

When scaling fast, Daniel focuses on three things: strong on-boarding guides, well-maintained documentation (now much easier with AI), and a buddy system that pairs every newcomer with a dedicated colleague. The buddy system works because it scales the human side of on-boarding — a tech lead or manager can do one-on-ones, but that's formal, and new people might be scared to speak up. The buddy creates a safe channel for questions, concerns, and cultural integration. Beyond people, scaling also means investing in automation and observability so that as you grow with customers, you grow with failures too — and your incident reporting doesn't burn out the team.

Building an AI-First Organization

"Every person uses AI. Every person has the capability to use AI. The company builds a second brain so AI can build on top of that."

At WageNow, Daniel has implemented what he calls an AI-first organization, inspired by Spotify and other companies pioneering this approach. The concept is simple: before doing any task, ask whether AI can help you deliver the output faster or better. This applies across the entire company — not just engineering. Daniel looks for people in HR, accounting, and UX who understand automation tools like n8n or Make.com alongside AI. The key ingredients:

• • Curate the data: Build a company "second brain" with clean, structured context for AI tools to work with
  • Train the muscle: AI ability is like a muscle — people must use it daily because these skills didn't exist 2-3 years ago
  • Share what works: Exponential AI adoption happened at WageNow once people started sharing their successes and failures with AI tools
  • Respect the guardrails: Data privacy and regulation compliance remain non-negotiable

The hidden productivity gains, Daniel argues, lie not in engineering (which gets all the attention) but in operations, accounting, HR, and every other area of the business.

Selling Transformation: Financial Arguments for Leaders, Ownership for Teams

"For the leaders, it's the financial thing and the cultural thing. For the people doing the work, it's personal development — having more control, having more ownership."

At Ringier Axel Springer, Daniel proposed and led a company-wide agile transformation — a 1-2 year effort that required convincing the CEO, product teams, marketing, and sales to change how they operate. His approach: build a dual argument. For leadership, frame the change in financial and cultural terms — more revenue with the same people, better visibility into how work translates to business outcomes. For the people doing the work, emphasize personal growth, increased ownership, and transparency. The transformation breaks silos between engineering and product, creating a shared backlog agreed with all stakeholders. Daniel looks for people with high agency — those who can reinvent and change themselves from the inside, not just wait for a change agent from the outside.

Balancing Experimentation with Operational Excellence

"The SRE books helped me understand quality as a feature — because quality is basically how reliable you are for your customers."

When asked about the books that most influenced his approach as a CTO, Daniel points to the Site Reliability Engineering series from Google — three books that frame quality as reliability, a feature your customers experience directly. Alongside those, he recommends The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, because he believes all tech people should have a sense of business and customer understanding. Together, these books guide how to balance rapid experimentation with operational excellence as the organization scales.

About Daniel Harcek

Daniel is a technology executive with a proven record scaling engineering organizations across fintech, cybersecurity, and digital media. Builds AI-first teams, operating models, and delivery cultures aligned with product strategy. Led platforms serving 30M MAU, deployed fintech capital pilots, transformed agile delivery at internet scale, and mentors global tech communities and ecosystems worldwide actively.

You can link with Daniel Harcek on LinkedIn.