🌡 Strategy & AI, Taking Risks, Conflict, On-Call, Greener Software, SLAs, Micro-Aggressions: TMW #371

Hello! It's Monday, welcome to the week!

Important: If you're intending to join us all in London for CTO Craft Con in May, you'll want to grab your ticket before the Early Bird discount on tickets disappears on March 22nd - the members-only price will increase from £649 to £749.

The line-up includes dozens of the world's best CTOs and thought leaders, panels, lightning talks from community members, and this time around we'll be adding two new ways of learning: themed roundtable discussions and 1:1 mentoring sessions. To see more about the subjects we'll be covering, take a look here, and don't forget that all attendees will be invited to our now-legendary Con After Party. Along with all of that, you'll get to meet hundreds of fellow technology leaders, build connections and learn how others deal with the same challenges you face as a CTO. It really will be unmissable!

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

To get your Early Bird members' ticket before the end of the week, use the access code "Community-May-24" at the checkout. See you there!

Here's how it went down last year....

On with the links... Until next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Events

CTO Craft Bytes: Exploring the Future of Platform Development: A Glimpse into 2030 with GenAI

Join us for an insightful Bytes session where we delve into the future of platform development in the year 2030, focusing on the transformative role of code as a commodity enhanced by GenAI capabilities. This session features Glyn Roberts of Vention, a seasoned expert with two decades of experience in web development, spanning roles from developer to CTO. Glyn will guide us through his vision of how platform development will evolve by 2030 and the far-reaching implications of an AI-centric approach in this field.

EventsRachel Thomas

CTO Craft Mixer: Manxchester 2024

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

EventsMatt Hunt

CTO Craft Mixer: Gothenburg 2024

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

EventsRachel Thomas

Mixers: We have a number of Mixer events coming up shortly in Gothenburg, Sofia, Bristol, Manchester, Bucharest, Munich and Berlin - read more here and book your place. Are you interested in launching a Mixer in your city? Drop us a line!

Reads of the Week

Strategy & Artificial Intelligence

A Story of Heuristics, Means & Tails

MediumRoger Martin

Why software projects fail

Some of you know that I work in the agency business — how that translates to my technical experience is that I used to work on many highly different

Vadim KravcenkoVadim Kravcenko

From our Sponsors

[From Uplevel] Manage your 15,000-engineer organisation as if it were five.

Uplevel helps enterprise engineering leaders increase productivity, quality, and people health so they can sustainably deliver the right things on time.

Explore Uplevel

A huge thanks to all our sponsors and partners, who make Tech Manager Weekly and the CTO Craft community possible:

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

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Leadership requires taking some risk.

At a recent offsite with Carta’s Navigators, we landed on an interesting topic: leadership roles sometimes mean that making progress on a professional initiative requires taking some personal risk. This lesson was hammered into me a decade ago during my time at Uber, where I kicked off the Uber SRE group and architectured Uber’s self-service service provisioning strategy that defined Uber’s approach to software development (which spawned a thousand thought pieces, not all complimentary).

Irrational Exuberance

The Builder’s Guide to Better Mousetraps - Marc’s Blog

Marc's BlogMarc Brooker

16 Reasons Not To Go Into Engineering Management

On the topic of the Individual Contributor to Engineering Manager transition, I collected signs that indicate if this might not be the right choice for someone. The list is a playful thought experiment, looking at the beliefs and traits that might show why being an EM could pose challenges for some.

Péter SzászPéter Szász

Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug — Ludicity

Ludicity

Culture, People & Teams

How to Turn Conflict Into a Constructive Negotiation | QAspire Consulting

This post illuminates some timeless wisdom from William Ury on how to turn a conflict into a constructive negotiation.

QAspire Consulting | Change Consulting | Visual Facilitation | Leadership Development | Graphical Recording | Sketchnotes & Visual Thinking | IndiaYour name*

My Product Management Toolkit (62): Morton’s Resolution Model

In my book Managing Product = Managing Tension I wrote about the importance of healthy conflict. If you can challenge each other’s ideas or opinions constructively, you’ll be able to re…

As I learn ...

Beyond the beep and saving sleep: optimizing the On-Call experience

Some strategies to minimize alert fatigue, enhance incident management, and prioritize team well-being

Scale XAlex Wauters

Culture, Fit, and Employee Motivation Strategies - Let’s Grow Leaders

Andre Martin discusses the importance of finding the right fit in your career and building a culture that supports employee motivation.

Let's Grow LeadersDavid Dye

Technology, Operations & Delivery

How Figma’s Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale | Figma Blog

Our nine month journey to horizontally shard Figma’s Postgres stack, and the key to unlocking (nearly) infinite scalability.

Figma

Reduce Your Software’s Footprint

How the Green Software Certification (by the Linux Foundation) can help

Level Up CodingSéverin Bruhat

The Shape of Code » What is known about software effort estimation in 2024

Derek Jones

Service Level Agreement

Introduction to the SLA in relation to SLI and SLO

Alex Ewerlöf NotesAlex Ewerlöf

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

TBM 278: The Power of Firsthand Experience

I was having lunch with my product leader friend Carey Caulfield recently, and something dawned on us: In the product world, we often forget how we came to “know” certain things. When someone doesn’t appear bought into a product-oriented way of working, it’s easy to chalk things up to mindset, intent, attitude, strength as a leader, etc. It’s easy to feel frustrated and not trusted.

The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler

A Personal Journey Through Stress Management Techniques

In the hustle and bustle of modern life, stress has become an inevitable companion for many of us. From deadlines at work to personal…

MediumAnushka Agrahari

On Microaggressions, Language, and Inclusion in the Time of Gen AI

The social and racial reckoning in the wake of the George Floyd murder in May 2020 made many acutely aware of automatic patterns of…

MediumCarin-Isabel Knoop (on Humans in the Digital Era)

Should We Work Hard or Enjoy Life? It’s Time to Rethink That

I’ve been reflecting a lot on my recent life.

Journal KitaYuan VK

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