
98: The Office of the CTO at RevenueCat, with Miguel Carranza
From The CTO Playbook by Adam Horner
June 1, 2026 · 48 min · Episode 98
About this episode
Miguel Carranza discusses the evolution of his role as CTO at RevenueCat and the challenges of engineering management.
When do you stop being the CTO with all the answers and start being the one who asks better questions? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Miguel Carranza built RevenueCat into critical infrastructure for thousands of mobile apps, and he'll tell you straight that he never wanted to be a manager. He got his first computer at age eight and moved from Sevilla to Silicon Valley to build things. Somewhere along the way, he had to stop being the best engineer in the room and start hiring people better than him. His worst hire is already on the team. That's not a red flag, it's the whole point of how he builds. The Office of the CTO, which he set up, exists precisely to keep that bar moving. The engineering managers who never wanted the job are the ones who work out. The smallest pull requests have caused the biggest outages. And AI is making his teams smaller, not larger. If you're a founder CTO trying to figure out when to delegate and when to dig in, this one will sit with you. You'll Learn: [00:00] Introduction…
People in this episode
Host: Adam Horner
Guest: Miguel Carranza
Topics covered
- CTO leadership
- engineering management
- mobile apps
- team building
- AI impact
Keywords
- CTO
- RevenueCat
- engineering management
- mobile subscription
- AI
- team dynamics
- leadership
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: RevenueCat
Places: Sevilla, Silicon Valley
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