Welcome to the automated warehouse of the future

Andy says:

"This in-depth interview with Paul Clarke, CTO at online grocery company Ocado, shows how businesses can innovate at scale. 

He delves into the automation and robotics that enable Ocado to store, pick and deliver groceries to millions of families in the UK, and touches on some of the moral and ethical questions of automation of factory and warehouse work."

Your Org Chart is Not Your Organization

But you know that. At least I think you know that.

Informal doesn’t scale

Did you know that a fly doesn’t scale? If you shot a growth ray at a fly until it was the size of your car, that fly would crush under its own weight. Its exoskeleton can handle only so much mass. It’s a good thing flies stay as small as they are.

Fear of Process or How to Scale the Team Without Getting "Corporate”

The word “Process”... strikes fear in the hearts of some but can be a huge turn on for others. A single word which became partially synonymous with

Delegate outcomes, not activities.

Do you consider yourself “a doer”? That person who enjoys doing the work, fine-tuning the details, meddling in the weeds of how it’ll all work? Then you probably have trouble delegating as a leader.

Interview with CTO and Co-founder of Zapier on Working with Remote Engineers

Bryan Helmig, сo-founded Zapier in late 2011 with good friends Mike and Wade, which was admitted to YCS12 batch. Zapier is a web automation app to build Zaps which can automate the most tedious parts of your day to day job.

Rapid response: how we fixed our on call process to avoid engineer burnout

Intercom’s mission is to make internet business personal. But it’s impossible to be personal when your product is broken. Uptime is critical to the success of our business, and not just because our customers are paying us, but also because we heavily dogfood our own product.

Solving the Problem with Problem-Solving Meetings

Your team is facing a complex problem. So you gather everyone for a meeting, only to spend hours disagreeing on the ideal solution—with no progress toward consensus. Facilitating productive problem-solving meetings can be challenging.

You Are What You Attend To

Time management is all the rage. The early bird gets the morning worm, we’re told. We feel pressured to do more and more, yet we struggle to find ways of meeting the demands of others and ourselves. If only we could find a way to navigate the tsunami waves of time.

How we serve 25M API calls from 10 scalable global endpoints for $150 a month

Our users typically call our API on each page request on their websites to geolocate their users and localize their content. So this particular failure was directly impacting our users’ websites on the biggest sales day of the year.

Data Science for Startups: Introduction

I recently changed industries and joined a startup company where I’m responsible for building up a data science discipline.

Hi, I'm Andy, founder of CTO Craft

I've been CTO or Head of Technology for a number of startups and charities since 2006, across a number of sectors, team sizes and technology stacks. If you'd like to drop me a line, simply reply to this email. I promise to reply to everyone personally.

CTO Craft Events @ Eventbrite

See what's coming up in the CTO Craft calendar!

CTO Craft Community Signup

We've created a brilliant community of around 600 CTOs, VPs of Engineering, Heads of Development and other Technology Leaders - join the team to get access to ad hoc mentoring and support, regular interviews and other events, book groups and much more.

If you'd like to be considered for the CTO Craft Community, fill in your details here, and we'll be in touch!