Between Fires and Futures: Real Conversations for Tech Leaders Navigating What’s Now—and What’s Next
Between Fires and Futures: Real Conversations for Tech Leaders Navigating What’s Now—and What’s Next
Podcast Description
Between Fires and Futures is the podcast for modern tech leaders caught in the constant tension of today and tomorrow.It’s the space between daily firefights—cloud issues, AI hype, security breaches—and the visionary work of building scalable, resilient, future-ready organizations.Each week, we talk with the strategists, technologists, and innovators doing the real work of leading change. These are unfiltered conversations that expose the tradeoffs, wins, and lessons no one puts in the case studies.No spin. No fluff. Just pressure-tested leadership, real-world insight, and bold thinking.https://www.technologymatch.com/
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast covers a range of themes relevant to tech leadership, including AI adoption, organizational resilience, and strategic foresight. For example, episodes delve into pressing issues like daily IT crises, practical AI use cases, and the necessity of shifting mindsets for successful transformation, ensuring that leaders have the tools they need to transition from firefighting to future readiness.
Between Fires and Futures is the podcast for modern tech leaders caught in the constant tension of today and tomorrow.
It’s the space between daily firefights—cloud issues, AI hype, security breaches—and the visionary work of building scalable, resilient, future-ready organizations.
Each week, we talk with the strategists, technologists, and innovators doing the real work of leading change. These are unfiltered conversations that expose the tradeoffs, wins, and lessons no one puts in the case studies.
No spin. No fluff. Just pressure-tested leadership, real-world insight, and bold thinking.
https://www.technologymatch.com/
What happens when your technology vendors are underperforming, but your organization doesn’t have the data to prove it?
In this episode of Between Fires and Futures, Tonya sits down with Matt Glenn, co-founder and CEO of Knit AI, to unpack a blind spot hiding inside many IT organizations: companies hold employees accountable for performance, but often spend millions of dollars with technology vendors without applying the same level of scrutiny. Drawing on experience from both sides of the vendor relationship, Matt explains why support quality can decline as technology providers prioritize growth and operational efficiency, and why IT leaders need better visibility into what their vendors are actually delivering.
Matt explains why vendor performance is often buried across support portals, emails, individual interactions, and unreliable memories, leaving CIOs without the evidence they need when renewal and contract negotiations arrive. He shares what Knit has learned from analyzing more than a million vendor interactions, including how unresolved support cases, missed SLAs, product defects, and months of back-and-forth can quietly consume valuable engineering resources. Rather than relying on vendor-curated QBR data or how teams feel about a provider at the moment, Matt argues that organizations need a system of record that reveals performance over time.
Tune in to hear:
- Why technology vendors should be held to the same performance standards as employees
- How growing reliance on SaaS, cloud, and third-party technology has increased vendor risk
- Why missed SLAs, product defects, and unresolved support cases quietly drain IT resources
- What more than a million vendor interactions reveal about the true cost of poor performance
- Why vendor-curated QBRs and customer reviews don’t always tell the full story
- How bringing objective performance data into vendor meetings changes the power dynamic
- Why vendor data can help CIOs distinguish between a provider problem and an internal team problem
- How performance trends can serve as an early warning system for long-term vendor decisions
- Why contract renewals and negotiations change when IT leaders have measurable evidence
- How vendor intelligence can help CIOs move from reactive problem-solvers to strategic business
Important Links:
https://app.technologymatch.com/solutions/vendor-performance-management
Website: knitit.ai
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewglenn/
Academic paper about the personality traits of people that work in it: https://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/cis/article/view/36413
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