🎥 Metrics, Reteaming, Servant Leadership, YOLOsec vs FOMOsec: TMW #198 by CTO Craft

Technology is constantly becoming smarter and more powerful. I often observe that as these technologies are introduced an organization’s productivity instead of improving has reduced.

We all rely on different signals in an office to understand the state of the team and identify warning signs that something may require our attention—or intervention.

In my previous essay, I wrote about how tech teams don’t learn. I don’t think it’s a secret that many training resources don’t work. So why do tech leaders put up with it, and pay for resources that they don’t value?

When I started at Storytel our team consisted of six developers. My first task was to grow the team, and after an intense period of recruitment, we were 15. It was clear that we could not continue working as a single team.

The business case for diversity is well-documented. Having diverse teams from the board room to the factory floor has positive impacts on…

About a year ago, I agreed to be promoted to interim CTO at Akvo. This is the “first steps that I took” on a series of blog posts about it.

A very important project that was a done deal, and that will secure the organization’s future for the next five years, failed to happen. Not winning this project meant that the organization was forced to “focus” and reduce costs.

After building a hiring framework to then downsize the Dev Team, next on my agenda as newly appointed CTO: the Hub Manager’s meeting.

Steffen Heilmann is a firm believer in empowering his people and giving them opportunities to grow. In his early weeks as CTO at Aroundhome, he and his staff were heading into an important negotiation with their data centre provider to take over responsibility of a mission-critical database.

Summary: Becoming a great executive requires a set of skills beyond what’s needed to be a leader. Executive skills are subtle and can be elusive to managers, demanding a great deal of focus, courage, and dedication.

One of the things I love most about SaaS is it’s the “as a Service” that really matters, not the Software.

Possibly my finest contribution to the infosec industry is introducing the concept of #yolosec, first discussed when I introduced decision trees as a threat modelling device in my Black Hat talk back in 20171.

One of the many upsides I’ve had from working at lots of organisations is that you get to see what’s common. Are things like this everywhere? Frequently, the answer is yes! An example of this is tech debt.

I have switched teams more often than I have had to implement an AVL tree, and you can guess which one of those two was taught in school. I wish someone had taught me how to join a new team! While learning a new codebase can be daunting, I’ve found a few things that work for me.

So much time and money is spent on maintaining technology within incumbent organizations. Instead of calling this tension “technology debt” or even “legacy technology”, JPMorgan Chase CIO for consumer and community banking Rohan Amin likes to call it heritage tech.