A Voight-Kampff Test for Identifying Engineering Managers

When I joined Reddit in late 2016, I was faced with a unique challenge: tripling the size of the engineering organization within a year.

Run Better Meetings with This Expert-Level Advice

Generally speaking, we decide what to cover on the Review based on conversations we have with founders — during listening sessions, on our internal First Round Network, at conferences, and around the office.

Help! My mentee isn’t listening to me!

Last week I had a fantastic conversation with a top employee on my team. He’s an up and coming Senior Engineer who recently started mentoring newer recruits.

Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

What is the best career advice you’ve ever received? Odds are it wasn’t from an annual performance review. Formalized performance reviews are at best an overly costly way to get marginal benefit, and at worst actively harmful to development and morale.

How To Lead When You Have No Authority

Everyone remembers the 2002 movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Its a hilarious story about the struggles of Toula (the daughter of a traditional Greek family) as she tries to fall in love and get married. There is one particular scene where Toula asks her father permission to go to college.

Your Environment Determines Your Mental Horsepower

When it comes to making decisions, your ability to think through problems is important. Consider this is your raw mental horsepower. But most of us never tap into our available horsepower because we overlook an important aspect: our environment.

Thinking in flow - some recent thoughts

I talk a lot about flow these days and I’m continuously fascinated how many good things follow by shifting our focus to supporting a better, faster and smoother flow. In this post, I just wanted to share a few thoughts that have been on my mind lately.

Agile Coach to Organisational Psychotherapist

My thanks to Beatric Düring for her recent Twitter question: “If I wanted dive deeper into org psychotherapy – what would be crucial knowledge I would have to acquire working as an agile coach? Where can I draw the line requiring professional psychotherapy education/training?” Is it feasib

Making Confident Product Decisions

In his first attempt to build and sell a product, Giles Palmer failed pretty badly. It was 2005, and he had just released Magpie Search and Alert, a vertical search engine product for law firms and banks to find specific for them documents such as patents, court rulings, financial statements, etc.

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.