🦐 Engineering KPIs, Feedback Models, Salary Crash?, Team Rituals, Motivating People, Strategy, Checklists: TMW #276 by CTO Craft
Hello again, welcome to the week!
This Thursday we'll be chatting with seasoned interim CTO and coach David Subar - David's been a long-time friend of CTO Craft and a regular in our Bytes events, and he's part of the team that runs the LA CTO Forum. He'll be chatting about his learnings as a CTO and coach, including collaboration and alignment, getting support as a leader, and a whole lot more. Tune in!
Don't forget, if you're not yet a member of the 4,250-strong CTO Craft Community, and you're in an engineering leadership position (very important - there are no recruiters, marketers or sales people allowed), please do reach out by filling in the application form here, and we'll get you added:
https://ctocraft.com/community
See you next week!
Andy @ CTO Craft
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CTO Craft Bytes
Fireside chat with David Subar, Thur 28 Jul 2022 at 16:00 BST
David will be covering topics ranging from effective team collaboration and alignment, getting support as a CTO, and the lessons he's learnt as a CTO coach.
Reads of the Week
How do I get better at giving feedback?
This week, we’ll look closer at a subject that seems simple in principle, but in practice can be quite tricky. I’m aware that the topic of giving feedback may come across as quite dry, and that the next tab or email might appear more interesting to read; but please be patient with me here.
The Great Tech Salary Crash
2022 is the year where Tech Compensation drops for the first time in decades. You hear non-stop about the rising costs associated with inflation, rents increasing ,and higher mortgage interest rates.
From our Sponsors
Using DORA Metrics to Boost Engineering Performance - from Code Climate
You’ve heard of the four DORA metrics, but do you know how to effectively leverage them to boost your team’s performance? In this virtual panel discussion, find out how engineering leaders at startups and enterprises alike are using DORA metrics to drive actual change in their organizations.
About our Sponsors
Thanks as always to the amazing sponsors helping CTO Craft bring you resources like this newsletter, our events, community and more:
AWS, CircleCI, Code Climate, O’Reilly, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, The Software House, iTechArt, LinearB, Lohika, Albany Partners, 101 Ways, PGS Software, YLD, Steamhaus, Swarmia
Culture & People
You will always have more Problems than Engineers
It has always been easier to break things than to make things. Software is no different. If anything, software has made it explicit. We can prove there are an infinite number of valid software programs. How many of those actually do what we want, without bugs?
Use The Team Rituals Canvas to Intentionally Design Your Culture
Workplace behaviors can happen by accident or by design. Team Rituals are a repeated enactment of a particular set of behaviors, scripts, and interactions — they wire people’s brain for success.
How to Resolve These Five Problems of Struggling Software Engineers
First of all, a caveat — I’ve never been a line manager to a software engineer but have coached developers in previous roles in an informal way.
Motivating People Starts with Building Emotional Connections
If you want to inspire and motivate others to achieve high levels of performance, tap into the power of emotion. In the research for our book, The Inspiring Leader, my coauthors and I analyzed 360-degree survey data on 25,000 leaders.
Leadership & Self-management
Why Does Our Strategy Keep Changing?
Stick with me while I explore strategy. This post is about a common problem: yo-yo strategies. Does your company change strategy every six months? Do things feel highly reactive? Is your team experiencing whiplash as it responds to the latest shifts?
4 Ways to Challenge People with Power and Grace
You can’t drift to high performance. Skillful leaders challenge people.
A Checklist Manifetsy
The first time I encountered it, Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto made intuitive sense to me. The book's thesis is straightforward: using checklists can lead to greater efficiency, consistency, and safety in the execution of complex tasks. Gawande, a surgeon, writes
How to Communicate with Intent as a Leader
As leaders we must perfect the craft of communication. It’s non-negotiable.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Product roadmaps can fail — here’s how to avoid it
Product roadmaps are an invaluable tool – not only for product managers, but every stakeholder involved in bringing a product to market. They are a statement of intent, providing clarity around your product plan and guiding you toward your product vision.
Can Agile and deadlines coexist in perfect harmony?
My typical reaction ranges from astonishment to bewilderment. Considering the number of times I have heard this type of statement, my level of surprise should diminish. But instead, my shock persists. After all, Agile methods are a strategy to reduce risk.
What happens when you press a key in your terminal?
I’ve been confused about what’s going on with terminals for a long time. But this past week I was using xterm.
How to Find the Value in Legacy Code
As software consultants, we work with a lot of legacy software systems.
That’s it!
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Have an amazing week!
Andy