6 min read

📷 Hybrid Working, PsySafety, Code Ownership, Onboarding, Leadership Styles, System Handovers: TMW #212 by CTO Craft

Hi there!

This week's Bytes panel is going to be focused on a topic that's about to become very relevant to most organisations who were at least partly collocated before the pandemic and lockdown: how to succeed with hybrid working, and the current best practices and thought leadership on the subject. Adam Leon Smith of Dragonfly will be moderating, and Nadia Alrami of Hubspot, Dileep Marway of the Economist and Anna Dick of HiringHub will be in the panel. Don't miss it!

📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Hybrid Working: They Who Dare, Win - Friday April 30th, 12:30 BST

Our Mentoring Circles taster session for Canada and the USA this week is now full, but we are collecting names for a similar session for the UK and Europe - if you're interested in learning more, check out the Mentoring Circles page, and drop us a reply if you'd like to join one of the tasters.

Until next time, hasta la vista!

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Bytes - Hybrid Working: They Who Dare, Win. Friday April 30th, 12.30 BST

CTO Craft Bytes - Hybrid Working: They Who Dare, Win.  Friday April 30th, 12.30 BST

Our speakers will share their experiences of managing hybrid teams, outline key benefits and challenges including attracting remote talent, encouraging collaboration, maintaining networks, and ensuring all team members are equally able to contribute through championing accessibility.

Reads of the Week

On the Bare Necessity of Psychological Safety

On the Bare Necessity of Psychological Safety

“Hey. Do you have a minute? I think I have a psychological safety topic.” I was stressed. Without a single frontend developer in our engineering team we were starting to slow down. I had finished the performance profile and sent it to my teammate two days ago.

Collective Code Ownership and Conway's Law

Collective Code Ownership and Conway's Law

Collective code ownership is an essential practice for Modern Agile software organizations. It was introduced to the masses via Extreme Programming (XP) in the late 1990s. However, in enterprises and multi-team software organizations, it is often mischaracterized.

Understanding the Roots of Our Cloud Complexity

Understanding the Roots of Our Cloud Complexity

We often talk about how engineering and operating software has gotten more "complex." But how has it gotten more complex? Understanding the “how” will help inform the solutions to our current and future complexity.

About our Partners

A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2021 - you’re all amazing!

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Culture & People

Myth: Experience Can’t Be Taught

Myth: Experience Can’t Be Taught

How I concluded that hiring developers based on "experience" is just plain lazy, and my exploration of an alternative approach.

Treat Your Onboarding Process Like Your Build System

Treat Your Onboarding Process Like Your Build System

Whether you have one, ten, or a hundred engineers, a scalable onboarding process is a very high leverage activity with immediate results and has great return on investment over time.

A Fair Way to Lead a Team of Contractors and Full-Time Employees

A Fair Way to Lead a Team of Contractors and Full-Time Employees

A large percentage of work in today’s organizations is accomplished through projects that have a discrete beginning and end with a specific outcome — such as creating new products, changing processes, transforming some aspect of the business, or serving a particular client.

Three Feedback Models

Three Feedback Models

Giving feedback is perhaps the most important part of a manager’s job. Feedback is the main mechanism by which managers help the folks on their team improve, so effective feedback leads to individual career growth and better team results: win-win. But giving feedback effectively is difficult.

Leadership & Self-management

Want to Build a More Caring Culture? Lessons from Lambda School & InVision

Want to Build a More Caring Culture? Lessons from Lambda School & InVision

Mark Frein has served as Chief People Officer at Return Path, InVision, and now Lambda School. Here, he shares his approach to spinning up the people function, as well as tactical tips for creating a great employee experience, enabling a workforce that feels seen and heard, and making an environment where people feel developed.

10 Leadership Styles in Management (and How to Find Yours)

10 Leadership Styles in Management (and How to Find Yours)

There are no concrete rules for how to be a leader, or what approach to leadership that you should take. Being a leader and finding your style of leadership takes some time, trial and error to identify.

Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving

Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving

A series of problem-solving experiments reveal that people are more likely to consider solutions that add features than solutions that remove them, even when removing features is more efficient.

It’s Past Time to Rethink the Role (and Label) of Manager

It’s Past Time to Rethink the Role (and Label) of Manager

People don’t want to be managed—they want to be supported, encouraged, challenged, exposed to new opportunities, and coached, but not managed. The view on the role of Manager is a relic of yesterday’s thinking and practice in management.

Agile, Engineering & Product

How to Successfully Hand Over Systems

In a product company, changes are inevitable so as to best support the strategy and the vision. Often during such a change, new teams are formed and other ones are restructured.

Blogumentation - Writing Blog Posts as a Method of Documentation

Blogumentation - Writing Blog Posts as a Method of Documentation

You may have noticed that recently I’ve been writing more articles, often tagged under blogumentation.

How to Prioritize Your Product Backlog

How to Prioritize Your Product Backlog

Every person in your company probably has a different opinion about what's the company's biggest priority. But which project should be prioritized? Fortunately, there are great methods to help you prioritize your product backlog.

Introducing the Wise Product Roadmap

Introducing the Wise Product Roadmap

Our teams are constantly building new products and features that help us get closer to our mission of building money without borders: moving it instantly, transparently, conveniently, and – eventually – for free.

5 Lessons learned from growing a PM team in a hyper-growth startup

5 Lessons learned from growing a PM team in a hyper-growth startup

Hi, my name is Victor. I co-founded a company called Spotistic back in 2012, which we sold to Uberall in 2015. Since then, I have been leading Uberall product team, which we’ve scaled from 3 people to 12 people over the past 5 years.

What Else?

How often do people actually copy and paste from Stack Overflow? Now we know.

How often do people actually copy and paste from Stack Overflow? Now we know.

They say there’s a kernel of truth behind every joke. In the case of our recent April Fools gag, it might be more like an entire cob, perhaps a bushel of truth. We wanted to embrace a classic Stack Overflow meme and tweak one of our core principles.

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