This talk is based on my experience running a tech-stack in a company that grew from SAP consulting into a multi-technology organization. A daily routine means switching between enterprise systems like CRM, ERP and SRM, diving into BI stacks and dashboards no one really understand, then moving on to discussions with an IoT design house, Edge AI team, AI/ML engineers to finish the day with Low-Code developers. Keeping in mind ongoing cloud migrations.

I will talk about the challenges of setting technical direction across such disconnected domains, what real conversations with highly specialized teams look like, and how architectural decisions are made without hands-on control. Beyond technology itself, we will look at how CTO decisions are shaped by market analysis, sales potential, positioning, marketing capabilities and timing. And why technically good choices can still fail in practice.