A CTO who restructures without leaving the trenches

Thomas Barrusseau joined theTribe as technical director in 2024. He'd already worked there as a developer before going to explore other worlds — from graphics engines to fintech. When he comes back, it's to take on a project from the roots: make the organization more fluid, strengthen expertise… while keeping what makes theTribe's DNA.

Coming back to "put the glue back in"

Thomas isn't exactly arriving at theTribe. He knows the place: he was a dev there, worked with them as a freelancer, stayed close to the GM (Benoît) and the Head of Sales (Florent).

"They called me back at a time when there were things to clean up. Not because everything was going badly, but because some foundations were getting blurry."

First project: take the load off the GM

When Thomas arrives, he sees right away that Benoît, the GM, is at the center of everything.

"He was doing annual reviews with every dev. He was tracking every topic. He was carrying every arbitration. It's too much."

So he creates an intermediate layer, the Engineering Managers, to take over.

"That's new for us. Before, we had coaches, mentors… but nothing really structured. Now we have small cells with clearly identified EMs, who smooth the communication and better distribute the responsibilities."

Second project: build up expertise engagements

The other priority is to better position ourselves on high-value engagements, beyond pure build.

"What we want to develop is auditing, advisory, fast but high-impact interventions."

He cites several very concrete cases:

→ Audits in industry, with companies that aren't familiar with digital at all.

→ Very synthetic readouts, on Notion or PowerPoint, between 10 and 20 slides, with tech recommendations, product roadmap, and staffing needs.

→ Quick diagnostics: "You arrive, you have two days, you have to extract maximum value and propose a clear action plan."

"These are engagements where we aren't just executors. We're there to clarify, prioritize, set a frame. And in that role, we're good."

He keeps a foot in production

Thomas hasn't left the code. He doesn't want to become a fully strategic CTO.

"I'm 50% on build topics, and 50% as a tech lead. I even took back a project recently because it was technically complex and right in my scope."

He keeps that connection with the teams as an anchor: "It's what lets me feel what's stuck in the projects. If I weren't touching anything anymore, I'd lose contact."

A multi-profile, multi-stack tech team

theTribe has about sixty people, including around forty in tech. Thomas walks me through the team.

"We obviously have devs, but also PMs who are a mix between project manager and product manager. They're the ones who handle the conversations with the client, the rituals, the adjustments. We also have quite a few designers, but not just for mockups: they run workshops, work with users to think the product through end-to-end."

And that's not all. The team also includes makers (Bubble, WeWeb, Xano…) for simple, fast projects, very DevOps-oriented profiles, and more classic devs, but spread across a very wide range of stacks.

"We work with lots of technologies: Node.js, PHP (Symfony, Laravel), Python (a lot of Django), React, Angular, Vue, Flutter… And on the infra side, AWS, Scaleway, GCP…"

That's not a choice of dispersion, it's deliberate:

"We don't limit ourselves to one technology. We prefer to staff the right profiles on the right projects, with the tools they know, rather than force a single stack."

Ideal stack vs. project reality

There is a "preferred" internal stack: NestJS, TypeScript, React, Flutter, PostgreSQL. But it's rare to be able to impose it from the start.

"We pick up a lot of legacy maintenance work. Old projects, sometimes badly built, that we have to stabilize and understand before proposing something else."

The goal is often to turn maintenance into a rebuild. But not by force:

"We take the time to take ownership of the project, to understand the business stakes, to build trust. And then we propose a stack we like, that we know, and that will be more maintainable."

Not that much AI… except in the tooling

On the AI side, Thomas immediately tempers the hype:

"Real AI use cases in client engagements are still rare. We've done some anti-spam, a bit of translation with LLMs, but it stays marginal."

The real change is in the developers' own tools: Copilot, Cursor, IDEs with built-in LLMs.

"The productivity gain depends a lot on context. You have to know how to dose it. And not forget that it's a very energy-intensive tool…"

He adds a point that's rarely raised: the arrival of "vibe-coded" projects. Meaning when a project is launched very fast, often by non-tech people or in no-code/low-code, with a more experimental than industrial logic.

"More and more prospects come to us with POCs done with AI. They don't hold up, but they're interesting. We pick them up, we restructure, we make them industrializable."

Low-code, a brick in its own right

Thomas insists on a point: low-code, with us, isn't just a fad.

"We don't do no-code to look pretty. We do well-thought-out low-code, that always leaves a way out to code what the framework doesn't handle."

He talks about tools like FlutterFlow, Bubble, Make. And especially about their in-house, open-source project generator that's used to accelerate kickoffs.

"We want to integrate these bricks directly into our tooling. It's not an exception, it's an extension."

Hiring in 2025: hard to find solid profiles

On hiring, Thomas doesn't beat around the bush:

"There's a real problem of level. A lot of candidates make it to the end of the process without knowing how to code cleanly. Even at supposedly senior levels."

The process is clear: a qualification call, a technical interview, an architecture evaluation or a live coding session, depending on seniority.

"What we look for is people who hold up technically, but also humanly. People who communicate well, who are curious, who want to grow."

And above all: profiles who know how to make decisions and produce clean work.

A CTO who gets his hands into the human side

Thomas also tells me about his managerial role. He doesn't do 1:1s with 40 devs, but he sees all the EMs every two weeks.

"They're my relays. We talk about morale, tensions, needs. I give them maximum visibility into the executive committee, they give me the field. It's smooth."

He describes the team atmosphere as human, committed, kind. And he holds that close.

"We want to avoid burnouts, friction, things left unsaid. The works council is active, and we're very attentive to making sure everyone is doing well."

The market? More cautious, more demanding

"We're in a period of widespread austerity. Companies are cutting their budgets. You have to earn every euro."

theTribe doesn't sell on price, but on quality:

"We reassure people on the fact that we don't go over budget. That we document. That we ship. And that we don't trap clients in closed technologies."

They also bet on their visibility… in ChatGPT.

"Some prospects found us directly via ChatGPT. We're working on making our content digestible for LLMs."

Last piece of advice for a CTO? Don't bet everything on the technical side

"The good CTO isn't the one who has all the certainties. It's the one who stays humble, curious, listening. And who knows how to live as part of a team."

And on the technical side?

"You have to keep up with the field. Build skills on subjects you don't know. We all have a topic we keep putting off. Kubernetes, CI/CD, databases, architecture… You have to dive in."

At theTribe, devs even work in "training cohorts" each week on a technical topic, together. Not to show off. To grow.

Thanks Thomas

A rich, humble, technical conversation. What Thomas projects is a clear-eyed, embodied vision, the opposite of the "visionary CTO" cliché.