Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #161

This free online session brought to you by CTO Craft will look at production team structures, inter & intra team efficiency, workflows, and organisational constraints.

I started my first company 15 years go, and I still can’t manage. I suspect that very few people can. With AngelList, we want a team of self-managing people who ship code. If they can’t ship, release them. Our environment is wrong for them. They should go find someplace where they can thrive.

Have you recently shifted to working remotely? Has it been a smooth process, or more of a bumpy ride? Getting into remote work is tricky. Making the switch from a regular co-located team to a fully remote team as many of us recently have had to do is particular difficult.

As COVID-19 has pushed more teams to work remotely, many of us are turning to video calls. And if you’ve ever been on a video call and wondered why it doesn’t feel quite the same as an in-person conversation, we have something in common.

Does your team have psychological safety? This may be a much more important question than you think. It may seem unintuitive but safety is a critical ingredient to unlocking your team’s potential. Google certainly believes so, and Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School agrees.

The suddenness and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic took many CTOs and CIOs by surprise as worries over the impact on a supply chain in China flipped, seemingly overnight, into a fight for corporate survival. Right now, I’m following the advice to stay home.

Throughout their careers, whatever question either Lily or Randy has had, Roman Pichler’s probably had some great advice on the topic! A longtime consultant, author and teacher, we grabbed him for a chat focusing on some of the lessons contained in his fourth book, How to Lead in Product Managemen

In this series on systems thinking, I share the key insights and tools needed to develop and advance a systems mindset for dealing with complex problem solving and transitioning to the Circular Economy.

As more leaders and people in management organize themselves into teams working at coordination and strategy “flight” levels, they — like the operational teams they support — use daily standup/flow-planning meetings.

On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.

We have been asking this question a lot lately. What makes an Agile Coach successful? Hiring is notoriously difficult in general, and we are in need of hiring top tier Agile Consultants and Coaches.

Almost everyone agreed that we need to get better at estimation. I heard this recently from a team. It’s not the first time, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Teams struggle with estimates; others needlessly obsess over it. And while I agree with the sentiment, it’s true but useless.

You might have discovered the Spotify model because you were trying to figure out how to structure your teams. Don’t stop here. Keep researching. Leaders of companies that have withstood longer tests of time have written far more than Spotify blogged.

Although most people see the value of Sprint Goals, how to create them is a huge source of confusion and frustration.

The testers begin to ask what kind of regression this will take, when the product owner interrupts. We’ll call her Katy. “Wait,” Katy says. “We can’t refactor that. I’ve looked at it; that seems fine.