🪂 Death Marches, Employee Engagement, Team Onions, Documentation, Stretch Goals, Collective Leadership: TMW #254 by CTO Craft
Hello, welcome to the week!
We have some big news at CTO Craft this week - we've drawn together some of the most amazing engineering leaders to support and help evolve our content creation process. The new Creative Committee includes eight long-term collaborators and subject matter experts. The goal is to broaden and diversify our approach to creating events, posts, emails and more for the CTO Craft community - we're incredibly excited.
This week, we have two lunchtime Bytes events - see below for more details
Until next time!
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Bytes
CTO Craft Bytes - Micro-Frontends, Scalable Teams, and Writing a Book, Tue 22 Feb 2022 at 12:30 GMT
Are micro-frontends just a hype or an advancement CTOs should care about?
CTO Craft Bytes - Compliance in the Cloud: Heaven or Hell? Fri 25 Feb 2022 at 12:30 GMT
Join this event to find out how to take advantage of Regulation to continue fuelling innovation.
From the CTO Craft Blog
Introducing the New, All-Star CTO Craft Creative Committee
CTO Craft is excited the announce the launch of the Creative Committee - taking the community's content and events to the next level
Why Success is Not a Repeatable Formula and Building Wisdom in your Engineering Organisation
Founder of Skiller Whale, Hywel Carver discusses why following in other companies' footsteps doesn't always get the outcome you want
Reads of the Week
What if the key to employee engagement is not that esoteric at all?
When it comes to employee engagement, we tend to overcomplicate things a bit. And maybe for a good reason, otherwise half the HR departments and all management consultants and bloggers like me would be out on the street.
Team Onion
The Team Onion by Emily Webber is a model to keep teams small, break down silos and create shared responsibility across team boundaries.
From our Partners
INTERACT for Engineering Leaders, presented by LinearB
INTERACT for Engineering Leaders is happening April 7th, starting at 2:00 P.M GMT! 1 day, 20+ speakers, it's virtual, it’s free, and it’s the best ROI for your time. Be sure to register here
About our Partners
A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2022 - you’re all amazing!
AWS, CircleCI, Code Climate, Karat, O’Reilly, Indiespring, Skiller Whale, The Software House, iTechArt, LinearB, Lohika, PGS Software, Albany Partners, 101 Ways, Steamhaus, Swarmia
🥝 🥝 If you’re interested in reaching thousands of senior technology leaders and decision makers, drop a reply to this email to see our Partnership Opportunities! 🥝 🥝
Culture & People
How Google, Twitter, and Spotify built a culture of documentation
Many technical problems ultimately turn out to be people problems, and a lack of good documentation is no exception. Writing and maintaining documentation is a habit that needs to be encouraged and nurtured.
Stretch Goals are Killing Your Team
“A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own,” wrote David Foster Wallace. There are few better definitions of leadership than helping those around you to achieve more.
Helping a “Storming” Team
All teams go through transitions. When people first get together into teams, it’s more a meet-and-greet than an actual team. Lots of individuals getting together to hopefully achieve something. Slowly, teams move through various stages until they start performing.
That Wild Ask A Manager Story
You may have seen this wild story from Ask A Manager a week ago: the new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed. If not, take a minute to read the story; it’s quite a ride.
Leadership & Self-management
14 principles that every CTO must have
Fortunately, this one is obvious: management is not the same as leadership. You are a leader because your people follow you. And you are a manager because your people work for you. There are managers who are not leaders and leaders who are not in managerial positions.
Collective Leadership – It’s Not Just for Hippies
We’re all used to a model of where there are leaders and there are followers. There’s the captain, and then there’s the team.
The Lessons From the First 50 Days in My Role as a CTO in a Startup.
A little while ago, I decided to change my career path and try something a bit different — a startup. I was very anxious to join a company that is only forming, but I felt like something was missing in all the roles I’ve been in so far.
How One Everyday Mistake Can Mess Up Your Leadership Decisions
As a leadership mentor told me years ago, “If you’re not clear who is supposed to make the decision, things will get very fuzzy, very fast.” Several years ago the organization I was with had partnered with another organization to present a leadership conference.
Agile, Engineering & Product
How to Understand and Relieve the Symptoms of “Agile” Death Marches
Did you ever work on a project that dragged on and on, slipping a week every week? Back in the day, we called those projects “death marches.” I never saw anyone literally die, but I saw too many divorces, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and very dissatisfied and unhappy employees and customers.
The State of JS 2021
A lot happened in 2021. So much in fact that the survey was pushed back all the way to 2022! Between a slew of faster build tools and a new crop of back-end frameworks, the JavaScript world kept evolving.
What TPMs Do and What Software Engineers Can Learn From Them
Question: What is this TPM role you’ve mentioned in previous newsletters? I’m curious to learn more. Great question. TPM stands for Technical Program Manager.
Building Infrastructure Platforms
Infrastructure Platform teams enable organisations to scale delivery by solving common product and non-functional requirements with resilient solutions. This allows other teams to focus on building their own things and releasing value for their users.
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:
Have an amazing week!
Andy