May 11, 2020

Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #162

By Andy @ CTO Craft • Issue #162 • View online

Hi there, welcome to the week!

This issue of TMW has been curated by Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel, two facilitators of CTO Craft’s Mentoring Circles, and authors of a new book, Agile Conversations, which comes out this week. Thanks chaps - over to you!

Hi there!

We’re very excited to share our new book with the CTO Craft Community!

Agile Conversations Book

Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture. Coming May 2020 from IT Revolution Press.

www.conversationaltransformation.com • Share

If you were part of the CTO Mentoring Circles that we’ve led you will find a lot of familiar material. For those of you who were not, we believe you’ll enjoy this step-by-step guide to having better conversations with your CEO, your peers, and others in your organisation.

Finding yourself frustrated? Our experience is that you can learn to change your conversations and get dramatically different results. We’ll walk you through how to do a conversational analysis, and then how to prepare for the key conversations of high performing teams covering Trust, Fear, Why, Commitment and Accountability. What we describe is simple, but it isn’t easy. These conversations require skill, and skill requires practice. Are you willing to put in the effort?

We hope you do, and that you tell us all about it!

Squirrel and Jeffrey

More about the book

Conversations: Humanity’s Secret Weapon - IT Revolution

Adapted from Agile Conversations, this excerpt talks about why conversations are so powerful and also why reflecting on our conversations is helpful for avoiding defensive reasoning

itrevolution.com • Share

The Authors of Agile Conversations Consulting with Parts Unlimited

Have you read The Phoenix Project or The Unicorn Project? Watch this video to learn about the real-world 4Rs for conversational analysis through the fictional world of Parts Unlimited

itrevolution.com • Share

IT Revolution Book Club, June 1st - 9th

There will be daily discussion questions on a private Slack channel; the authors will join you and your fellow book club members on Slack each day to answer questions, expand on their writing, and offer additional guidance and learning; plus two, live AMA’s with the authors

itrevolution.com • Share

Talking about remote talking

Given our focus on conversations we want to comment a bit about how remote is different.

How to Combat Zoom Fatigue

Why do we find video calls so draining? There are a few reasons

hbr.org • Share

Why Time Signals Still Matter When Working Remotely

Pay attention to the signals you’re sending about time when managing remote workers during the coronavirus pandemic

sloanreview.mit.edu • Share

Remote opportunities

One impact of lockdown is an increasing number of conferences, events, and other opportunities that are being made location independent. Here are a few that caught our attention this week

Observability Office Hours by Liz Fong-Jones

It is still early days of being able to tap into the global talent pool to answer our questions, and we’re excited to see this sort of “remote office hours” being tried by more people

www.honeycomb.io • Share

What will conferences look like in the future? That’s a question where the answers are still being created as an increasing number give it a try online

Software Circus: Down the rabbit hole - May 21st

Go down the rabbit hole at this Cloud Native virtual festival. Join Kelsey Hightower, Anne Currie, Jamie Dobson, Ellen Körbes, and Adrian Cockroft, to name just a few!

www.softwarecircus.io • Share

Citcon - May 29th & 30th

CITCON is a cross-functional, open space, Continuous Delivery conference that pre-dates the term “Continuous Delivery”. CITCON brings together people from every corner of the software development industry to discuss Continuous Delivery and the practices (e.g. Continuous Integration and Testing) that go along with it. (Note: CITCON London 2006 is where the Agile Conversations co-authors met for the first time)

citconf.com • Share

CukenFest - June 3rd & 4th

CukenFest London is a BDD and Agile conference focused on building shared understanding between IT and business teams.

cukenfest.cucumber.io • Share

And of course these remote events make recording easier, so here’s one from last week

GitHub Satellite - May 6th

Watch the entire 12-hour live stream below or browse through the work and play tracks to dive into the sessions that interest you most

githubsatellite.com • Share

Grab bag

To Microservices and Back Again - Why Segment Went Back to a Monolith

We’ve seen a lot more skepticism about microservices recently. We think specific cases help, so we appreciate it when people take the time to share their thinking when they reverse course. This summary of Alex Noonnan’s talk, her slides, and a related panel will give those considering microservices vs monolith some food for thought

www.infoq.com • Share

The slides for the above talk!

Alex Noonnan’s slides for her talk on microservices at Segment

qconlondon.com • Share

Panel: Microservices - Are They Still Worth It?

The panelists have moved from the monolith to microservices and in some cases back again and they have strong opinions on monorepos, on operating distributed systems.

www.infoq.com • Share

From Zero to CTO: Jon Topper is in the spotlight

CTO of the Scale Factory Jon Topper tells CTO Craft about his experiences as a new technology leader, the skills he had to develop, what works for him now and where he’s headed over the next five years

ctocraft.com • Share

Is your product development system strategic or utility?

A brief but thought provoking read. Is our time spent thinking about our product development system justified? Is it really strategic given our situation?

medium.com • Share

Thanks so much to Jeffrey and Squirrel for curating this week - very best of luck with the book launch!

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.typeform.com/to/XXRNqV

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Have an amazing week!

Andy