🛎 Conference, Job Specs, Decision Making, Burnout, Bad Managers, Metrics, Observability: TMW #186 by CTO Craft
Morning!
Those of you who in the CTO Craft Slack will have spotted our big news last week - we're planning a conference!
Plans are still coming together, and we'll be doing a formal launch shortly, but we've got amazing sessions with the CTO of Github, VPs from CircleCI, Headspace, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a load of others on the line-up. Have a look at the conference page for a sneak peek and to grab your early-bird tickets: https://conference.ctocraft.com
This week's Bytes panel will be on Embracing Organisational Agility, with Giles Lindsay and Alistair Corrie:
📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Embrace Organisational Agility - Fri, October 30, 2020 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM GMT
Hywel Carver's Tech Lead Dinners are going virtual this time, and there are two events still to come:
- Two-tier teams (leading the team leads who lead teams) on 28 October
- Huge teams (too big to have a two-tier structure) on 4 November
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
The Anatomy of an Inclusive Engineering Job Spec - from CTO Craft
Diversity boosts tech innovation across product, design and user experience. Attracting diverse engineers starts with an inclusive job spec.
Reads of the Week
How Employee Engagement Has Changed in 2020
2020 has changed just about everything, especially employee engagement. With that in mind, we fielded our annual Employee Engagement & Workplace Report this year and uncovered some remarkable insights and trends.
From our Partners
AWS and DevOps expertise on hand - from The Scale Factory
Here when your team needs it most - 10% off subscriptions
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Culture & People
7 Strategies for Better Group Decision-Making
When you have a tough business problem to solve, you likely bring it to a group. After all, more minds are better than one, right? Not necessarily. Larger pools of knowledge are by no means a guarantee of better outcomes.
The Essential Common Ground For Highly Effective Teamwork
In a recent workshop we hosted with close to 100 participants, we asked participants “what organisational problems, obstacles, and risks are preventing you from successfully testing business ideas”? One of the biggest pains iterated by most participants was the lack of time.
Why Burnout Should be a Topic at Your Next Board Meeting, and What to Do About It
The Economist ran a story about the future of work this week. Working remotely, we have reduced meeting length by about 15% and increased our total time at work by 2 hours per day. We might declare we have found an extra 10 hours in the workweek from nothing.
Don’t kill bureaucracy, use it
Bureaucracies are the scaffolding needed to implement new ideas at scale. Just remember to dismantle them when the work is done.
Leadership & Self-management
The lasting impact of 2020 on leadership
There are still a few months left in the year, and given what has happened in 2020 so far, there’s probably still time for yet another seismic event.
5 Signs of a Bad Manager Senior Leaders should look for before it’s too late.
If you’re not looking out for them, the signs of a bad manager can be hiding in plain sight. And before you know it, you’re having conversations like the one above, losing your best people. The fact is, people leave managers not companies.
Choosing the Management Track
Several months ago a friend of mine reached out to me because he was considering changing from an individual contributor (IC) role to an engineering management (EM) role at work.
3 Simple Habits That Separate Successful Leaders From Everyone Else
Bosses come and go like the seasons. Unfortunately, so do many employees, as overwhelming data shows that people don't leave jobs; they leave their bosses.
Agile, Engineering & Product
The Most Underestimated Force in Tech — Cycle Time
What separates the best software teams from the rest of the pack? Do they work more hours? Have brilliant engineers? The free cold brew keg in the office? Nope. It's none of those things. Rather, it's the speed and quality of their execution.
The Tyranny of Metrics
There seems to be a growing trend in technology--and in all aspects of our lives, really--to measure everything: business outcomes, organizational success, and individual performance.
How to Build Observable Systems - An Introduction to Observability
Recently I have been hearing about observability more and more. The promise that an observable system can help us to debug and identify performance and reliability issues in a microservice architecture sounded quite good to me. Hence I decided to read up and learn more on this topic.
What Else?
DeepMind’s Journey from Games to Fundamental Science
Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, dreams of using AI to solve fundamental problems in science.
Thank you to Our Partners!
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:
http://www.techmanagerweekly.com
Have an amazing week!
Andy