5 min read

🎸 IKEA Effect, Technical Assessments, High Performance, Culture Killers, Exec 1:1s, Accountability: TMW #289 by CTO Craft

Hello again! Hope you had a good weekend

Last week's Bytes London event with Meri Williams and Alfonso Ferrandez chatting about Interim CTO Roles went brilliantly - massive thanks to the panel and everyone who came along, and to Megan and Nick from the CTO Craft team and all the Albany Partners crew for pulling it altogether. The recording is being edited as we speak, and will be up on the CTO Craft YouTube Channel very shortly.

This week, we also lost Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Thoughts go to everyone in the family, and to anyone who's been affected by her loss.

We'll be making some massive announcements about the November CTO Craft Con this week - keep your eye on the Slack group for details, and to get your CTO Craft member's discount.

Until we meet again!

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Bytes

Quantifying and Improving the Business Impact of Engineering - Thu, 15 September 2022 16:00 BST

Quantifying and Improving the Business Impact of Engineering - Thu, 15 September 2022 16:00 BST

Acquisitions, mergers, and reorganisations can have a significant impact on an engineering team’s ability to function efficiently and effectively. Kazoo HR has been through all three, and its engineering team has come out stronger than ever.

Reads of the Week

When Developers Leave — Where Does the Knowledge Go?

When Developers Leave — Where Does the Knowledge Go?

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge. John Naisbitt The big resignation has seen developers leave companies in greater numbers, and suddenly companies are worried that the knowledge left with those developers might be useful.

The IKEA Effect - Why people fall in love with their own ideas

The IKEA effect describes how people come to overvalue things in which they have successfully put effort into. This cognitive bias can pose risks to organisations in the form of sunk cost effects and “not invented here” syndrome.

From the CTO Craft Blog

How to Create Technical Assessments that Candidates ACTUALLY Complete

How to Create Technical Assessments that Candidates ACTUALLY Complete

Sometimes teams fixate on a hiring process that hinders their ability to hire the right talent. However, selecting the right technical assessments may increase your chances.

How to Ensure your Team is Delivering Business Impact — and not just Lines of Code

How to Ensure your Team is Delivering Business Impact — and not just Lines of Code

Once you get started, there’s a virtually endless list of things you could measure. However, the most important question for any software company is: what are we getting in exchange for our investment in product development?

From our Sponsors

Hyperautomation strategies - from O'Reilly

Hyperautomation strategies - from O'Reilly

Join O’Reilly on Sept 20 for a free online event exploring strategic ways to tackle one of the hottest tech trends of 2022—hyperautomation.

It’s free, but registration is required.

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, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Google Cloud, iTechArt, Jellyfish, LinearB, Lohika, 101 Ways, O’Reilly, PGS Software, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, Steamhaus, Swarmia, YLD

Culture & People

How to Build a High-Performing Team: Ten Vital Conversations

How to Build a High-Performing Team: Ten Vital Conversations

Every truly high-performing team has one thing in common: They spend time in candid conversation talking about what’s working and consistently look for ways to improve. They look at the work they’re doing and ask “how can we” do this EVEN BETTER?

Use Proven Success Factors From The Past, To Improve Your Team In The Present

Use Proven Success Factors From The Past, To Improve Your Team In The Present

Share successes from the past, create transparency about the present and identify improvements for the nearby future

How To Spot The 6 Greatest Culture-Killers Your Team Can Face

How To Spot The 6 Greatest Culture-Killers Your Team Can Face

What you allow, you encourage. In leadership, this nugget of truth is especially true when it comes to the building of a healthy culture. When the leader allows fun, candor, initiative and diligence, those qualities will be encouraged to flourish.

Joyful Complex Work

Joyful Complex Work

When we reframe the goal as “making it easier to work on complex problems” (vs. making complex problems easy) what comes to mind?

What describes an environment that is conducive to joyful work on complex problems?

Leadership & Self-management

One-on-ones with executives.

One-on-ones with executives.

Often when an organization is going through some turmoil, executives think to themselves, “Ah, I should have some one-on-ones with the team so they can hear how we’re handling this.

How management by metrics leads us astray

How management by metrics leads us astray

Let’s say my goal this year is to get to 10k monthly recurring revenue (MRR). MRR first, everything else second. I would ruthlessly cut out all activities that don’t lead to a measurable MRR increase. For example, I would stop writing blog posts like the one you’re currently reading.

How Can You Foster Accountability On Your Team?

How Can You Foster Accountability On Your Team?

We must hold our people more accountable! How often have you heard this workplace mantra? Probably very often. Anytime we can’t release the sprint or meet our goals, targets, and numbers, whenever people constantly repeat the same mistakes, or the quality of work isn’t acceptable, we hear it over and over.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Quality Is Systemic

Quality Is Systemic

Software quality is more the result of a system designed to produce quality, and not so much the result of individual performance.

Boring is Beautiful in Software Development

Boring is Beautiful in Software Development

No matter how good the developers are or how hard they work, creating software takes time. You cannot produce unique, complex software quickly. No substantial software is creating quickly, no matter what the plan on a page says or how many developers you throw at it.

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:

https://techmanagerweekly.com

Have an amazing week!

Andy