The CTO
Field Guide to
Agentic Excellence
Turn individual AI wins into reliable engineering team performance.
Get the free guide with five practical layers, field checks, and a plan for your first 90 days.
Your best engineers are already using AI.
Now make the whole team excellent.
One engineer gets impressive results. Another spends hours correcting agent output. Review queues grow, and the gains disappear before anything reaches your customers.
Closing that gap is your job as CTO. This guide gives you a place to start and a clear path forward.
Inside, you’ll learn how to:
- Find where AI gains get lost.
Measure delivery, quality, and total human effort so you know what is actually improving. - Make your best engineers’ discoveries work for everyone.
Turn private prompts and scattered knowledge into shared context and repeatable workflows. - Delegate with confidence.
Define what agents can handle, what needs review, and who owns the result. - Build quality into the workflow.
Use automated checks and clear approval rules to keep delivery moving as agent output grows. - Build a team that keeps improving.
Adapt roles, develop internal champions, and turn lessons from each delivery into better ways of working.
Find your team on the Agentic Excellence scale: Experimenting, Using, Proficient, or Excellent. Then use the field checks and 90-day plan to decide what to improve first. A concrete software factory example shows how shared workflows become a system your team can run.
The Author
Written by Stefan Grothkopp, who built AI software and a software factory as CTO at a successful AI startup, transformed his engineering team around agents, and helped customers do the same. Today, he helps engineering teams progress toward Excellent through Agentic Excellence coaching, training, and consulting.