Earlier this month, Plandek was proud to attend CTO Craft Con London 2025, one of the UK’s leading gatherings of engineering leaders, innovators and technologists. This year’s conference delivered on its reputation, offering cutting-edge insights into engineering leadership, generative AI, R&D productivity in software engineering, team performance, and more.

Our COO, Will Lytle, took to the main stage to present a session that resonated with today’s most pressing challenges: The Future of R&D Productivity: Leveraging a Strategic Framework and GenAI for Lasting Impact. Watch his full speech below.

What you’ll learn from Will’s talk

In his session, Will explores how organisations can unlock the next level of R&D productivity in software engineering by combining GenAI tools with Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platforms, like Plandek. He breaks down:

1. Why productivity is coming into such sharp focus of technology teams
2. How we can start to measure productivity in software delivery
3. What the team of the future will look like with Agentic AI tools
4. What you need to do now to start to prepare your teams and pipelines to take full advantage of Generative (GenAI) and Agentic AI.

He also challenged a common misconception: GenAI alone is not the silver bullet. It’s when paired with SEI platforms – capable of surfacing and aligning metrics across teams – that real, lasting impact can be achieved.

Key takeaways from CTO Craft Con: London 2025

This year’s event had a clear takeaway: engineering productivity is under the spotlight – and data-led decision-making is now a must-have. Whether you’re a CTO, CPO, or delivery leader, the challenge is the same: How do we deliver more value, more predictably, and with less waste?

Here’s what else we found:

1. GenAI’s growing influence – but with caution: There’s enthusiasm about AI, but also a growing consensus that measuring its impact across the full delivery lifecycle is essential. This is where Plandek’s GenAI framework steps in, helping companies benchmark progress and ROI across speed, quality, and predictability
   
2. Engineering leadership is getting smarter: Today’s CTOs are no longer just technical advisors – they’re strategic enablers. The need for real-time visibility into delivery health, investment effectiveness, and team alignment has never been more crucial.
3. From gut feeling to data-driven: We saw a clear shift away from intuition-led decision-making to metrics-led improvement cultures. Plandek was repeatedly referenced as a key enabler in this transformation, with its intelligent analytics providing “the single pane of glass” across tools like Jira, GitHub, and Azure DevOps.

The conversations at CTO Craft London made one thing clear: software engineering teams need better ways to demonstrate impact and deliver more with less. Will’s session highlighted how combining SEI platforms like Plandek with GenAI isn’t just a future vision – it’s happening now. With the right metrics, visibility, and frameworks in place, organisations can unlock meaningful gains in velocity, focus, and predictability. To see it for yourself, book a free demo with Plandek.