|
Welcome to the week - here's your regular shot of reading material; remember to pass it on to anyone you think might enjoy the read!
The CTO Craft Community is now an amazing 430 CTOs, Heads of Engineering, Development Managers and Lead Engineers of all shapes and sizes, and the conversations have been amazing. If you would like to know more about joining the Community or attending one of our regular Mentoring Circles, fill in your details here, and we'll be in touch!

Check out the TMW Archive. There's some real treasure in there.
Andy at CTO Craft
|
|
|
From Zero to CTO ā 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 ā and still is ā difficult. I wish we had been better informed and less opportunistic
|
|
|
|
|
Dealing with different personalities
You get all sorts of people working in technology. Letās 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 ābestā 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 1990iesāoutsourcing, for example, software development as a non-essential business areaāhas 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 organizationsāof any size and across industriesāhave five key elements in common.
Our experience and research demonstrate that successful agile organizations consistently exhibit the five trademarks described in this article.
|
|
|
Leadership & Self-Management
|
|
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.
|
|
|
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 andĀ Anxiety
We have difficult jobs. The problems we solve as software engineers are challenging, demand rigor, and generally cause us unreasonable amounts of stress.
|
|
Agile, Engineering & Product
|
|
|
Story Epilogues
Hereās a trick I use when scoping stories, and wrestling with the competing pressures of independence, value, āreleasabilityā, etc. Itās 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, orĀ 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 donāt care if a story is 1 or 8 points. They donāt care about what you had to do to deliver it.
|
|
Best Practices for Staging Environments
Letās talk about staging. Weāre talking about staging because no one talks about it. Itās mentioned in passing as the annoying sidekick to production. Itās 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.
|
|
|
|
Maximize Follow Through (#117)
Think about how the team will follow up and set yourselves up for success
Prepare a flip chart with 4 columns titled 'Action', 'Motivation', 'Ease' and 'Reminder'. Write down the list of actions the team wants to take in the first column. Read out each action and fill in the other columns by asking:
- Motivation - How can we motivate ourselves to do this?Ā
Examples: 'Jane will own this and feedback at the next retrospective', or 'We'll reward ourselves with cake on Friday if we do this every day'
- Ease - How can we make it easy to do?Ā
Example: For an action 'Start involving Simon in the stand up' a possibility could be 'Move the task board next to Simon's desk'
- Reminder - How will we remember to do this?Ā
Examples: 'Richard will put a reminder in Google Calendar' or 'We'll do this after the stand up each day'Actions do not require all of the above. But if there are no suggestions for any of the columns, ask the team if they really think they will do it.

|
|
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.
|
|
|
|