Feb 1, 2021

💻 Talent Strategy, Executive Presence, Storytelling, Resilience, Feature Flags, Prioritisation: TMW #200 by CTO Craft

By Andy @ CTO Craft • Issue #200 • View online

Hey there, good to see you again!

Well, here’s a landmark - our 200th issue of Tech Manager Weekly! Almost four years of weekly reading material, guides and interviews with some of the world’s best CTOs and senior technology leaders - phew! Here are the three most-clicked articles from the TMW archives:

Maximize your team. How I created an Engineering Roadmap

Extremely Transparent and Incredibly Remote - GitLab’s radical vision for the future of work

The Art of the OKR, Redux

This week’s Bytes event will be a deep dive with Philip Reynolds, VP of Eng at Workday on the topic of influence and executive presence - he’ll be in discussion with Dan Smith around building trust, visibility and key relationships, as well as reputation building.

📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Building Influence and Executive Presence - Fri February 5th, 12:30 GMT

We’ll be making a very big announcement shortly in the CTO Craft Slack group - if you’re not a member yet, head over to the community page and fill in your details and we’ll get you added in the next batch

See you next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

How should your Tech Talent strategy adapt to Covid, Brexit and IR35? | CTO Craft

Consultant Candy Stanley explores longer term hiring strategies and how you might want to go about building your technology teams.

ctocraft.com • Share

Reads of the Week

The Tech Debt Playbook

All software teams have technical debt — parts of the code that weren’t created with today’s challenges in mind, or were written poorly, or were expedient hacks that are now problematic.

cgroom.medium.com • Share

How This CEO Creates an Internal Culture With a “Crazy Focus” on Good Storytelling

David Cancel has penned two books, crafts a popular weekly newsletter, contributes to outlets like TechCrunch and Inc, and hosts a great podcast. But he’s not a marketer by training.

firstround.com • Share

About our Partners

A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2021 - you’re all amazing!

Amazon Web Services, The Scale Factory, 101 Ways, YLD, LinearB, Albany Partners, Skiller Whale, iTechArt Group and PGS Software

🥝 🥝 If you’re interested in seeing our Partnership Opportunities, drop a reply to this email! 🥝 🥝

Culture & People

How to measure and improve success in your engineering team

As an engineering leader, senior developer, or founder of a new startup, I want you to take a minute and think — really think — about a project you are currently working on.

erix999.medium.com • Share

What to put on your team meeting agenda

Bear with me here. I know it sounds preposterous to just be starting to run regular team meetings in our company, given that if you were to peek at the calendar of any working person, “Team Meeting” would likely be the most frequently slotted event.

medium.com • Share

WTF Happens to Psychological Safety When the Pressure Is On?

A child stands in the middle of a group of friends, eyes closed and falls backwards. In this game, the child will know and trust that someone will catch her.

blog.container-solutions.com • Share

The Holiday Test

Can you pass the holiday test? First-time leaders often ask, “How do you know you’ve built a high-performing team?” My response? Use the holiday test. You pass the test if you answer yes to, “Can you take 1-2 weeks of holiday?” A holiday should be a proper holiday.

www.patkua.com • Share

OKRs and performance reviews: Four traps to avoid

OKRs are a huge part of an organization’s performance management toolbox. It’s easy to want them to interact closely with other tools, namely performance reviews AKA appraisals. From there, it’s all too tempting to combine them in a software solution.

medium.com • Share

Leadership & Self-management

How to start a new tech exec job

This will be a bit different from the usual stuff I write about, which usually deals with tech stacks and architecture. Why? Well, I recently took on a new position and I knew that I had to set up some clear basic guidelines to myself on how I’m going to tackle this new challenge.

nirrub.medium.com • Share

What the distinctive brains of resilient people can teach us

It wasn’t his first snowboard jump, nor the worst he’d performed. He hadn’t tried a fancy turn or trick. But that day in December 2015, Cisco García lost his balance and, after flying 10 metres, fell hard on his back, destroying his spinal cord. He was 33 years old.

psyche.co • Share

What are the 5 stages of burnout?

Where do you find yourself across these five stages of burnout? In an ideal world, nobody would experience burnout. It’s the state of mind that comes with long-term, unresolved stress, and it can negatively affect your work and your life.

www.thisiscalmer.com • Share

How hard should I push myself?

How hard should I push myself? It’s a question I ask myself a lot, and I bet you do too. On the one hand I really want to push myself.

every.to • Share

Agile, Engineering & Product

Why does it take so long to build software?

Why does it take so long to build software? We hear variations of this question frequently: Why is building software so expensive? Why is my team delivering software so slowly? Why am I perpetually behind schedule with my software? There is a good reason we hear these questions over and over.

www.simplethread.com • Share

User Story or Manager Story

A pet peeve of mine is when people say “user story” as a generic term for any discrete chunk of work the team needs to accomplish.

www.mattblodgett.com • Share

Keystone Flags: Feature Flagging With Less Mess

Feature flags aren’t a free lunch. Feature flagging logic can add clutter to your codebase – ugly if/else statements, which can make the path of execution harder to follow, and debugging runtime flow tricker.

www.split.io • Share

How to Prioritize Features and Projects: Here’s the Ultimate List of Prioritization Frameworks

With 70+ methods listed, this is the most complete list of prioritization frameworks on the internet with tons of linked resources. This is meant to be a scannable, inspirational resource for managers in product or anywhere. Before you start, I hope you can forgive me for the lengthy post.

productcoalition.com • Share

What Else?

Quantum Internet Signals Beamed Between Drones a Kilometre Apart

Entangled photons have been sent between two drones hovering a kilometre apart, demonstrating technology that could form the building blocks of a quantum internet.

www.uasvision.com • Share

That’s it!

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

https://ctocraft.com/community

Please do remember to share this link if you know of anyone who’d like to receive TMW:

http://www.techmanagerweekly.com

Have an amazing week!

Andy