🍵 Coaching Culture, Forecasts, Ambiguity, The Walk and Talk, Shortcuts, Team Stress: TMW #363

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

Firstly, a reminder that we're calling for speakers for CTO Craft Con: London until January 26th! This is your opportunity to share your knowledge and connect with a large community of tech leaders. Presenting offers numerous benefits, including increased visibility, valuable networking, and a platform to showcase your work. You can learn more about submitting a talk in this blog post.

Jen Beattie, a previous speaker, highlights the confidence boost and networking opportunities that come with presenting. She encourages first-timers to step outside their comfort zone and emphasises the supportive community at CTO Craft.

Charlie Markham, another speaker, shares tips on refining your content and focusing on key takeaways. He advises enjoying the experience and connecting meaningfully with the audience.

Remember, even if you're not chosen this time, there will be future chances to present. Don't miss this chance to raise your profile, network with fellow tech leaders, and share your valuable insights. Submit your Call for Papers today.

Even if you're not submitting a talk, we'd love to see you there - use the access code Community-May-24 to enable member ticket pricing.

That's it, on with the show!

Andy @ CTO Craft

Submit your Call for Papers and make an impact | CTO Craft

Submit your Call for Papers for our 8-9 May CTO Craft Con 2024 by 26 January 2024 to engage with a diverse tech leaders. Find out more.

CTO CraftSarah Haselwood

CTO Craft Events

CTO Craft Con: London | 8-9 May 2024

CTO Craft Con will bring together over 500 Chief Technology Officers and other senior technology leaders from the most exciting start-ups, scale-ups, unicorns, and big tech companies to elevate their engineering culture in London, May 2024

CTO Craft Con London 2024

CTO Craft Bytes: Remote Realities - What does Culture mean now?

Is Culture Dead? In this Bytes session, we delve into what Culture means and how a CTO leads a team in a remote-working world.

Eventbrite

CTO Craft Mixer: Berlin

Join our community of CTOs and senior tech leaders for an informal meet-up in Berlin

Eventbrite

Reads of the Week

5 Steps To Create A Coaching Culture In Your Organization

Discover what a coaching culture means, what the potential benefits are, and how to nurture one in your organization.

People Managing PeopleBree Garcia

How to measure the accuracy of forecasts

How do you assess forecasts, when the forecast is only a probability? It’s not just about accuracy. Let’s dive into the math.

A Smart BearJason Cohen

From our Sponsors

[Podcast] Great Software People

HeadChannel partners with the "Great Software People" podcast, hosted by Richard Bundock, featuring software industry pioneers. Available bi-weekly on Spotify, Apple, and Amazon Podcast.

Spotify - https://bit.ly/3QFqRSA
Apple - https://bit.ly/3QFaeX2
Amazon Podcast - https://bit.ly/3u29rXg

Thanks as always to all the amazing sponsors helping CTO Craft bring you resources like this newsletter, our events, community and more:

AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Coherence, HeadChannel, Google Cloud, Jellyfish, Kata, Polly, Skiller Whale, Softwire, Sema, Uplevel, Vention, YLD, 101 Ways

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Navigating ambiguity.

Perceiving the layers of context in problems will unlock another stage of career progression as a Staff-plus engineer, but there’s at least one essential skill to develop afterwards: navigating ambiguity. In my experience, navigating deeply ambiguous problems is the rarest skill in engineers, and doing it well is a rarity. It’s sufficiently rare that many executives can’t do it well either, although I do believe that all long-term successful executives find at least one toolkit for these kinds of problems.

Irrational Exuberance

Presenting to Executives

In a 60 minute meeting, you have 15 minutes, max.

blog.danielna.comDan Na

New Engineering Managers Have a High Failure Rate — This Figma Leader is on a Mission to Fix It

Are leaders setting up new engineering managers to fail? Marcel Weekes (VP of Engineering at Figma) sure thinks so. He unpacks his playbook for supporting the tricky transition from senior engineer to people manager and tested tactics for avoiding the common traps.

TBM 267: Debt and Bridge Building

You are an explorer and have stumbled into a fertile valley. The valley has a river. You’ve decided to build a bridge. Your options are: Quick and dirty—something barely capable of getting you across the bridge. Unsafe, but does the job right now. 2-3d

The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler

Culture, People & Teams

The Walk and Talk: Everything We Know

Kevin Kelly and my notes detailing everything we’ve learned walking and talking these past six years

Craig ModCraig Mod

The Offsite Misconception: Why They’re Not Perks, But Business Essentials

Debunking the myth of offsites as perks, highlighting their crucial role in fostering productive, cohesive business environments.

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Why Isn’t My Team Talking To Me? (Hint: Psychological Safety) | David Burkus

Psychological safety makes the difference between teams that hide mistakes, and teams that communicate early and often.

David BurkusDavid Burkus

How Much Do Companies Invest in Developer Productivity Teams?

Benchmarking data on the percentage of engineering headcount that companies are allocating to centralized developer productivity teams.

Engineering EnablementAbi Noda

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Highly Profitable Engineering Teams

Up until a year or so ago, less than 5% of startups would even consider the concept of engineering being a profitable and healthy organization. ZIRP and the financial climate meant that wasn’t real…

Aviv Ben-Yosef

LukeW | The More Features You Add...

As Dave Fore once said: “features are the currency of software development and marketing.” Spend time in any software company and you’ll begin to echo that sent…

LukeWLuke Wroblewski

The Secret Cost of Technical Shortcuts | 8th Light

How do software teams ensure they make great decisions about what to work on? Keeping decisions small is a good first step. The software industry has learned the woes of multi-year projects that result in unwanted products. Small steps with quick del…

8th Light

Am I spending too much on my dev team?

Software is built by teams, not by individuals but how do you calculate the business value that team delivers?

The Technology Leader's ToolkitFergus Doyle

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

How to Keep a Pulse on Your Team Members’ Stress Levels

What is the stress curve and how to use it?

Management MattersNikki Parsons

Your Burnout Is Trying to Tell You Something

Research has established that burnout is primarily the result of psychologically hazardous factors that occur at your workplace. Not being given the resources or time you need to manage your workload, for example, or working in an environment where you have insufficient control and autonomy, are known burnout triggers. No two experiences of burnout are exactly alike, and recovery requires that you pinpoint the unique workplace conditions that are contributing to your stress. One way to do this is to use your self-awareness skills to tune in and discover what your experience of burnout is trying to tell you — indeed, what it’s been trying to tell you all along. Here are some of the vital and lesser-known messages that burnout can reveal, and what to do about them.

Harvard Business ReviewKandi Wiens

How to write more at andrewchen

5 Effective Ways to Overcome Discouragement

Practical Strategies to Thrive in the Face of Challenges

SYNERGYSéverin Bruhat

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:

https://techmanagerweekly.com

Have an amazing week!

Andy