From Zero to CTO — Tamara Lohan is in the spotlight

Leading a global team was much more challenging than we anticipated. Keeping the brand, culture and ethos alive when the team were on the other side of the world was — and still is — difficult. I wish we had been better informed and less opportunistic

How to identify and address CTO smells — Self-management

Process, tick. People management, tick. So, what is there left to learn? Well, more about you and the way you manage. It’s easy to forget…

Developers and engineers — what’s in a name?

Why the name you give to your software-builders matters

Dealing with different personalities

You get all sorts of people working in technology. Let’s start with a story. There are two meeting rooms, side by side. The camera pans over to the first of them, on the left.

Why hiring the ‘best’ people produces the least creative results

While in graduate school in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took a logic course from David Griffeath. The class was fun. Griffeath brought a playfulness and openness to problems. Much to my delight, about a decade later, I ran into him at a conference on traffic models.

13 Signs of a Toxic Team Culture

What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies—outsourcing, for example, software development as a non-essential business area—has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations. And yet, they still do not understand what it takes to build a decent product/engineering culture.

The five trademarks of agile organizations

Agile organizations—of any size and across industries—have five key elements in common. Our experience and research demonstrate that successful agile organizations consistently exhibit the five trademarks described in this article.

How to Convince Your Boss to Start 1 on 1s with You

First of all, it’s a very mature decision to ask for 1 on 1s; you are telling your manager you want to have strong, effective, structured communication with them.  That’s a win-win for everyone.

The Dark Side of Leadership

By living with a facade that is difficult to maintain and is stressful to make decisions from daily...we set ourselves up for ultimate failure. A fulfilling, happy, passionate life NOT lived.

Become an Effective Leader by Mastering this One Skill…

Typical answers include: a high IQ, a “hustle” attitude, and a big personality. But today, many experts are embracing another answer: high emotional intelligence.

CTO: A Dangerous Title

The chief technology officer (CTO) job title has been floating around the IT industry for at least a decade now, so it's had enough time to settle in. And the places that it's settled are rather unsettling.

Engineering with Stress and Anxiety

We have difficult jobs. The problems we solve as software engineers are challenging, demand rigor, and generally cause us unreasonable amounts of stress.

Shims, Jigs and Other Woodworking Concepts to Conquer Technical Debt

In the early 90s, celebrated computer programmer and wiki inventor Ward Cunningham first synthesized the concepts of complex technical development and debt. The coined term gives a name to the sinking feeling that haunts dev teams the world round.

Story Epilogues

Here’s a trick I use when scoping stories, and wrestling with the competing pressures of independence, value, “releasability”, etc. It’s super simple. I work backwards from a theoretical discussion with the user post-release.

Ask an Expert - Microservices

Has adopting microservice architecture changed the way we develop software? The potentially unsatisfying answer is that microservice architecture has both changed and not changed how we develop software.

User Stories: Bin, Thin, or Split?

How does your team approach slicing it up? By far the two most common approaches I see are: The problem is that the people using our product don’t care if a story is 1 or 8 points. They don’t care about what you had to do to deliver it.

Best Practices for Staging Environments

Let’s talk about staging. We’re talking about staging because no one talks about it. It’s mentioned in passing as the annoying sidekick to production. It’s the expected and completely necessary part of the deployment cycle barely touched by schools or internships.

As AI Makes More Decisions, the Nature of Leadership Will Change

It is tempting to regard artificial intelligence as a threat to human leadership. After all, the very purpose of AI is to augment, improve, and ultimately replace human intelligence, which is still widely regarded, at least by us humans, as our key competitive advantage.

Activities from Retromat

The weekly retro activity comes from Retromat by Corinna Baldauf. Do your team a favour and pick up a copy right here!

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.