6 min read

🚂 Incident Management, Titles, Emotions, Strategies for Scaling, Leading Peers, Error Budgets: TMW #199 by CTO Craft

Hi there, welcome to the week!

You may remember we announce CTO Craft Learn at the conference in December, with some early-bird pricing for the first courses and workshops, which will be launching in February. We've made some amazing progress on those and we're almost ready to run some beta tests of the first of the Labs workshops over the next few weeks

That early-bird tier is still in place, so get in quick if you'd like to take advantage. The first few Labs and Masters will cover topics including 1:1s and Feedback, the First 90 Days in a Leadership Role, High Performance Teams, Organisational Design and Building Alignment, along with a load more.

🎓 CTO Craft Learn: Guided Labs and Courses for Technology Leaders

This week's Bytes event will feature John Wards of the Economist in conversation with Emma Hopkinson-Spark of 101 Ways on the topic of incident management, post mortems, etc:

📆 CTO Craft Bytes: Damage Control: Fixing the Fallout - Fri January 29th, 12:30 GMT

Until next time!

Andy @ CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

Organisational Design - How Titles Can Make a Difference | CTO Craft

Organisational Design - How Titles Can Make a Difference | CTO Craft

Andreas Wolff, CTO of healthcare technology company Pando discusses how titles can aid communication and benefit your organisation.

About our Partners

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

Amazon Web Services, The Scale Factory, YLD, LinearB, Albany Partners, Skiller Whale, iTechArt Group and PGS Software

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

Culture & People

Why Tech Is Still Toxic for Women (and What to Do About it)

Why Tech Is Still Toxic for Women (and What to Do About it)

Back when I was still taking public transport, I remember being on a mostly empty train one sunny afternoon. There was a young woman standing holding onto the pole with a large portfolio propped against her leg, maybe heading to university, maybe an interview, maybe her entry-level creative job.

Empowering Your Team to Regulate Their Emotions at Work

Empowering Your Team to Regulate Their Emotions at Work

Many companies strive to cultivate a culture where emotions are anything but volatile. Having an even-keeled demeanor is seen as a formula for cohesiveness. Even-keeled teammates don't lash out at colleagues. They don't create a hostile workplace.

Bureaucratic Blunderland

Bureaucratic Blunderland

How about an irreverent respite? In today’s post we’ll look at the 1973 book, Malice in Blunderland, by Thomas L. Martin, Jr., once the Dean of Engineering at the University of Arizona and later the President of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The Five Levels of Remote Work

The Five Levels of Remote Work

COVID-19 has forced companies the world over to enact — or create — remote working protocols. The likes of Box, Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have all told their employees some variation of “work from home”.

Leadership & Self-management

Questionable Advice: “How do I feel worthwhile as a manager when my people are doing all the implementing?”

Questionable Advice: “How do I feel worthwhile as a manager when my people are doing all the implementing?”

Hey, real quick: how long have you been managing? If it’s less than two years, honey, the answer is “you don’t.” Your feelings about your performance don’t mean much in a new role. If you think you’re crushing it, you probably aren’t.

Taking over a team — part II

Taking over a team — part II

We know a thing because it belongs to a class; we see a thing because it belongs to itself. — Chapter 9, The religion of Man, Rabindranath Tagore. In addition to using those 1:1s to listen and to build confidence with the team, I also used them to map out my evaluation of the team.

10 technical strategies to avoid when scaling your startup (and 5 to embrace)

10 technical strategies to avoid when scaling your startup (and 5 to embrace)

From premature optimization to over-engineering solutions for your product, it’s easy to get caught up in making technology decisions that slow you down instead of speeding you up.

Avoiding Delegation Downfalls

Once or twice a year I’ll go through a phase of extreme delegation to cope with the demands of startup life. I make long lists of my worries — responsibilities, systems, activities, even relationships — and ruthlessly brainstorm how to hand them off to someone else.

Leading Former Peers: 27 Tips, Tactics, and Techniques

Leading Former Peers: 27 Tips, Tactics, and Techniques

Recently I asked my subscribers to describe some of the leadership challenges they were facing.  One topic that kept coming up was leading former peers.  One respondent wrote that he had gone from “being one of the guys in the office for the past 18 years to being their director.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Creating a Risk-Adjusted Backlog

Creating a Risk-Adjusted Backlog

This article explains what a risk-adjusted backlog is, why they are useful, how to create one and how teams work with them. What is a Risk-Adjusted Backlog?

How to measure technical debt

How to measure technical debt

In my years as a software engineer I was always drawn to the shiny new things. But time and time again I got confronted with code ridden with technical debt. If you are working in tech you probably heard of technical debt.

Architecture Ownership Patterns for Team Topologies. Part 3: Multi-Team Patterns

Architecture Ownership Patterns for Team Topologies. Part 3: Multi-Team Patterns

As a system grows, higher-order abstractions are needed for ease of understanding, communication, and management. In Geography, continents are a higher order abstraction that allow us to collectively describe a large number of countries in a single word.

Error budgets and the legacy of Herbert Heinrich

Error budgets and the legacy of Herbert Heinrich

Here’s a question that all of us software developers face: How can we best use our knowledge about the past behavior of our system to figure out where we should be investing our time? One approach is to use a technique from the SRE world called error budgets.

What Else?

As Adobe Flash stops running, so do some railroads in China

As Adobe Flash stops running, so do some railroads in China

The railroad system in Dalian, northern China, collapsed citywide on Tuesday for up to 20 hours after the Adobe Flash programing software stopped running. Adobe had announced as early as 2017 that it would cease support for the multimedia software on Dec. 30 last year.

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