May 18, 2020

Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #163

By Andy @ CTO Craft • Issue #163 • View online

Hi all, welcome to the week!

Alongside an AMA with Marc Adler, former CTO at ADP, MetLife, Quantifi, and various startups starting on Tuesday, we have a fireside chat with Alex Dean of Snowplow Analytics on Friday at 12.30pm UK time, where he’ll be talking to Glyn Roberts about the best approach to building a data and analytics team, common pitfalls, etc. If your business has reached the stage where you’re considering this, you should definitely come along:

📅 CTO Craft Bytes - How and When to Build a Data and Analytics Team

Until next time!

Andy @ CTO Craft

Mentoring Circles for CTOs - join a Community of Practice and accelerate your leadership development

Learn about how a Mentoring Circle can help you build leadership skills as a technologist; super-charge your leadership skills in a Community of Practice for CTOs and other Technology Leaders

ctocraft.com • Share

Reads of the Week

How to expand conflict capacity in times of crisis

As trite as it sounds, there are always amazing personal growth opportunities in every crisis. Leading in a COVID-19 economy requires a higher level of conflict capacity than leading when things are stable.

www.smartbrief.com • Share

The Human Cost of Tech Debt

Because of the metaphor’s power and subsequent effectiveness for business concerns, it is often used to describe the health of projects, particularly vis a vis deadlines and milestones. The developers may communicate that an aggressive deadline will result in technical debt, making features in the future take longer to ship.

www.infragistics.com • Share

Culture & People

To Remove Organizational Silos, Start Here

Knowing how stubborn silos can be and how rarely they are actually removed, we will need to tackle them with fresh perspectives.

illustratedagile.com • Share

“Our dev culture is based on Bushido Samurai code”

We have an important mission here at GigSmart but it isn’t life and death. And when it starts to feel that way I like to remind the team that when we make mistakes we can learn from them and move on. But I do like the idea of engraving the code into my mind each day.

linearb.io • Share

Make It Safe! Psychological Safety for You and Your Teams

Steven Limmer talks about the initial management of software and how it evolved to Agile, and then discusses the common issues with “Agile”, and how this has led to failure and mistrust.

www.infoq.com • Share

Now Is an Unprecedented Opportunity to Hire Great Talent

According to The Economist, four-fifths of CEOs worry about skill shortages — up from half in 2012 — while outside hiring at the top reached record highs, causing business for large global search firms to increase by 9% to 15% last year.

hbr.org • Share

Leadership & Self-management

Commonwealth Bank CTO details how crap data, legacy can kill you

“I remember the day in August… August 17 of 2018. Matt [Comyn], who was head of the retail bank at the time, walked into the executive team and said, ‘we’ve got a big problem’. I remember the hour.”

www.itnews.com.au • Share

Facing impostor syndrome and time management issues

I often hear people talking about impostor syndrome and time management issues. Sometimes I hear about these issues from a friend, a direct report, and occasionally from myself. We are always challenged by them and they can affect our mood, our ability to be productive and our judgement.

leonardofaria.net • Share

From Zero to CTO Christophe Popov | CTO Craft

ex-CTO at Football Index Christophe Popov 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

Google Spent Years Studying Effective Bosses. Now They Teach New Managers These 6 Things

Using Project Oxygen, an internal study that analyzed more than 10,000 manager impressions including performance reviews, surveys, and nominations for top-manager awards and recognition, Google identified eight habits of highly effective managers.

www.inc.com • Share

How to Use Skip Level 1 on 1s to Majorly Improve Your Managers as a Senior Leader

Do you know how your managers are doing? Would you be surprised if any of them suddenly had a few team members quit?

getlighthouse.com • Share

Agile, Engineering & Product

Rebuilding our tech stack for the new Facebook.com

Facebook.com launched in 2004 as a simple, server-rendered PHP website. Over time, we’ve added layer upon layer of new technology to deliver more interactive features. Each of these new features and technologies incrementally slowed the site down and made it harder to maintain.

engineering.fb.com • Share

Strategic DDD Remote Collaboration Toolkit

No sign up, installation, or payment is required to view the board. In order to use the tools you will need to copy them onto a board of your own. For that you can use Miro’s free tier. The free tier will allow you to invite guests so that you can collaboratively model together.

medium.com • Share

Spotify vs. Fitbit

The author criticizes the Spotify model of scaled Agile, but neglects to mention that Spotify built a company now worth more than $25B, while competing – and often winning – against both Apple and Amazon, two of the very best product companies in the world.

svpg.com • Share

NoEstimates, Applied

A colleague recently posed the following rhetorical scenario about how to deal with a situation that presumably requires upfront estimates, to which I responded internally.

mattphilip.wordpress.com • Share

What Else?

The Nag Metric

A: We need more people to sign up/try this feature/engage with this content/convert to payer.

B: Okay. Let’s add more call-to-actions and make them more prominent.

lg.substack.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.typeform.com/to/XXRNqV

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Have an amazing week!

Andy