Aug 24, 2020

Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #177

By Andy @ CTO Craft • Issue #177 • View online

Hello again!

Standby for some exciting news in the coming weeks - we’ve got two big developments underway at the moment. We’ll be unveiling both in the coming weeks, so keep your eyes peeled.

Thanks as always to our Headline Partner, Amazon Web Services - if you’re interested in partnering, drop us a line!

Until next time

Andy @ CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

What is the true cost of your hiring process? | CTO Craft

COO/CTO Adam Martin offers expert advice on how to calculate the true cost of your hiring process and refine it to maximise effectiveness.

ctocraft.com • Share

Creating a rewarding journey through an Engineering Growth Framework.

Salary and remuneration is an often controversial topic. In Engineering (I’m sure the same problems exist in other teams too), I’ve found the process of pay and promotions to be a subjective and opaque process.

medium.com • Share

From our Partners

Bridge the IT Gap Today - from AWS

Explore this AWS eBook to learn why the skills gap is often so difficult to close, understand the challenges with recruiting versus training IT talent and enable successful transformation through your Cloud Foundation Team.

pages.awscloud.com • Share

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Culture & People

How to Spot and Magnify the Powers of Your Engineering Superheroes

It may not be instinctual to link director Christopher Nolan and Looker founder Lloyd Tabb, but the two might view the world through a shared lens.

firstround.com • Share

Making Learning a Part of Everyday Work

As automation, AI, and new job models reconfigure the business world, lifelong learning has become accepted as an economic imperative. Eighty percent of CEOs now believe the need for new skills is their biggest business challenge.

hbr.org • Share

Accountability is not responsibility

I’ve noticed some of my colleagues seem to use the terms accountability and responsibility as if they were the same. They are not. I’ll tell you a story to illustrate the difference.

www.adamconrad.dev • Share

Debugging engineering velocity and leading high-performing teams

You have a solid set of engineers, you’ve embraced OKRs and Agile, you’ve got standups, and you also do Sprint planning and retrospectives.

leaddev.com • Share

Leadership & Self-management

A Simple Framework for Software Engineering Management

This post is about a simple software engineering management framework that I’ve been using for about six months with the team that I’m currently leading.

medium.com • Share

When Your Job Comes Without a Map, You Need This Skill

As I advanced in my career, the maps grew sketchier; bosses expected me to think for myself. That absence of clear direction could be a little nerve-wracking, but gradually I began to appreciate the upside: a vaguely defined job provided the opportunity to remake it into something new and exciting.

www.primechiefofstaff.blog • Share

Go Slow to Go Fast: Why Process Matters

Pick your favorite adage. Mine is “measure twice, cut once”. I am the daughter of a carpenter and a surgical nurse so it seems fitting. I have worked as an investor in and builder of technology for nearly 20 years. With every project completed, book read and year that passes — I learn.

medium.com • Share

Four Ways Good Leaders Become Great Ones

Great leaders are committed to developing other people as leaders, which often means putting them in positions where they might fail.

www.edbatista.com • Share

Don't Create Chaos

One of the most harmful behaviors I’ve observed in ineffective leadership is a tendency to add chaos when one enters a room.

staysaasy.com • Share

8 Leadership Myths Every Manager Should Know About

We all have preconceptions of what it means to be a good leader. Here are 8 popular myths about leadership and how to overcome them. We all have preconceptions of what it means to be a good leader and what sorts of characteristics we believe leaders must exhibit.

fellow.app • Share

Agile, Engineering & Product

Building resilient services at Prime Video with chaos engineering

Large-scale distributed software systems are composed of several individual sub-systems—such as CDNs, load balancers, and databases—and their interactions. These interactions sometimes have unpredictable outcomes caused by unforeseen turbulent events (for example, a network failure).

aws.amazon.com • Share

Scrum Master Interview Questions (1): Scrum Master Role

Scrum has proven time and again to be the most popular framework for software development. Given that software is eating the world, a seasoned Scrum Master is nowadays in high demand.

age-of-product.com • Share

Product Team Mistakes, Part 2: Selecting, Estimating, and Prioritizing Features

A little while ago, I asked a lot of designers what product managers did that annoyed them the most. For the sake of fairness, I also asked PMs the same question about designers. I thought maybe I’d get a few responses and write up a quick blog post about some of the worst offenders.

www.usersknow.com • Share

How we use Golden Paths to solve fragmentation in our software ecosystem

“His spice-induced visions show him a myriad of possible futures where humanity has become extinct and only one where humanity survives. He names this future ‘The Golden Path’ and resolves to bring it to fruition.

engineering.atspotify.com • Share

What Else?

These AI-generated tennis matches are both eerie and impressive

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, there was no Wimbledon Championship this year. But that didn’t stop a team of researchers from Stanford University simulating the annual tournament with the help of artificial intelligence. The team trained their AI using a database of annotated footage.

www.engadget.com • Share

That’s it!

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https://ctocraft.com/community

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Have an amazing week!

Andy