🦞 Employer Branding, PM vs PO, Delegation, Distributed Teams, Self-reflection, Decision Records: TMW #185 by CTO Craft

Hello again, welcome to the week!

Giddy with excitement at this end.. We have a couple of huge announcements about to be unveiled to CTO Craft Community members this week - these are game-changers, so if you'd like to be first to hear about them, make sure you've joined the CTO Craft Slack group, as they'll be announced there first. To join, head to ctocraft.com/community and fill in the form.

This week's Bytes event will be on the topic of employer branding in the engineering context - don't miss it if you're in hiring mode, or would like to widen the top of your funnel:

📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Engineering Employer Branding: Be a Talent Magnet - Thu, 22 October 2020 18:00 – 19:00 BST

Remember, all our previous Bytes are recorded and available on Crowdcast: https://crowdcast.io/ctocraft

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

CTO Craft Bytes - Engineering Employer Branding: Be a Talent Magnet

This free fireside chat brought to you by CTO Craft will discuss how to build an employer brand that attracts and retains tech talent. Find out how to identify why employees join your company, and learn how to engage your engineers to spread the word about it within the community.

Reads of the Week

The Impact of COVID-19 on the CTO/VPE Search Environment | CTO Craft

Founder of Albany Insights James Goodrich talks to CTO Craft about CTO hiring over the next 12 months and offers exclusive market insights.

Product Managers and Product Owners: What’s the Difference?

For this month’s Product Talk post, I recorded a video where I consider the difference between product managers and product owners. You can watch the video or read an edited version of the transcript below. This is a topic that’s come up quite a bit for me in the last few weeks.

From our Partners

Now Go Build - from AWS

Join Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels on a worldwide journey to uncover the startups solving the toughest problems our planet faces.

🥝 🥝  If you’re interested in seeing our Partnership Opportunities, drop a reply to this email! 🥝 🥝

Culture & People

Who do I delegate to? A CTO's guide to developing leaders

Discover how to identify, nurture and delegate to natural leaders within your team in three stages - a must-have CTO's guide.

How to debug distributed teamwork, as suggested by new research

We surveyed thousands of workers across the globe to see how COVID-19 and the sudden shift to working from home has affected them. Here’s what we uncovered. As a researcher interested in teamwork and team effectiveness, March 2020 was a fascinating moment for me.

4 Tips for Addressing—and Even Embracing—Tension

Tension frequently arises when teams are trying to align on a shared vision or strategy. After all, when there are various stakeholders involved, they’ll likely have a variety of approaches. But it’s draining to debate things like your purpose or mission statement all day long.

31 Questions to Ask Remote Employees to Better Support Them

As a manager, it can be hard to understand what your remote workers are going through. And this can make them feel isolated in more ways than one. Remote employees are separated from the rest of the office, so they’re out of the loop of normal office communication.

Leadership & Self-management

How Self-Reflection Can Make You a Better Leader

Your company is expanding into China. Your most trusted team member put her notice in this morning. And your desk resembles a second-grade science experiment run amok.

The start-up CTO

Technology has a massive share of the start-ups across any nation — because it is simple right? No stock, no warehouse, no regulations (?!) and 000s of users already linked to app stores, the internet and their favourite browser.

Don't make yourself redundant

This article is part of a series on managing managers. I was flicking through my dusty copy of High Output Management recently and I was reminded of this fantastic piece of advice.

The Leader and the Sharpie

I’ve recently had the opportunity to do leadership training for 40 execs and managers for one of LA’s success story tech companies. This is a fairly in-depth, multi-month, multi-session program with multiple cohorts.

Agile, Engineering & Product

The Lead-Squad Protocol

How to successfully drive initiatives, objectives or opportunities that require several squads (or teams) to succeed? How to do this in a way that respects the agile mindset without falling into the command-and-control trap? Today, this problem is more complex than it seems.

Decision Records

This captures our architectural decision records. Michael Nygard explains this well in his original article of why we should do this: Large documents are never kept up to date. Small, modular documents have at least a chance at being updated [...] Nobody ever reads large documents, either.

Limiting Work In Progress

In many organizations today there is one thing that almost always is true: there are too many things done in parallel, there is too much work-in-progress, everyone is busy but nothing gets done.

Are Estimates Ever Helpful to Developers?

We know that stakeholders and clients want estimates. They benefit from being able to plan, prioritize, and predict the dates their product will be delivered.

What Else?

Simple Risk Measurement documentation

All risk measurement must start somewhere, and this tutorial represents the earliest examples of scenario measurement. These example scenarios and their forecasts are similar to using your shoe to measure “one foot”. Low rigor measurements are still useful for day to day, “back of envelope” risk modeling with low cost and effort. They can easily be expanded upon as requirements demand more rigor.

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