---
aliases: ["Podcast recording — 2025-01-02"]
Is A: Event
Date: "2025-01-02"
Belongs to: "[[2025-01]]"
Related to: ["[[person-matteo-gentile]]"]
Tags: ["Work", "Podcast"]
---
# Podcast recording — 2025-01-02
Recorded episode with Matteo Gentile. Great conversation.

## Notes
- Episode theme: second session with Matteo — 2025 planning edition, focused on how engineering leaders should approach annual technical roadmapping and capacity planning
- Matteo shared his template for balancing feature work, tech debt reduction, and platform investment across quarterly planning cycles, including how he presents these trade-offs to non-technical executives
- His consulting experience across dozens of organizations gave him a broad dataset of what works — he identified three common anti-patterns in annual planning that he sees repeatedly: overcommitting to features, underbudgeting for reliability work, and treating security as a project rather than a continuous investment
- Strong start to the new year of recordings; Matteo's structured thinking makes for clear, actionable content that listeners can apply immediately
- Memorable insight: "If your annual plan does not have at least 20 percent unallocated capacity, you are not planning — you are writing fiction"
- Clean audio throughout; both on Riverside with backup tracks

## Follow-up
- [ ] Send thank-you email to Matteo and ask for a redacted version of his planning template
- [ ] Draft show notes with the planning framework as a downloadable resource
- [ ] Schedule editing with [[person-paco-furiani]]
- [ ] Create social media clips — the 20 percent unallocated capacity rule will get shares
