May 9, 2022

☎️ Ownership, One-Minute Managing, Dependencies, Stakeholders, Continuous Load Testing: TMW #265 by CTO Craft

By Andy @ CTO Craft • Issue #265 • View online

Hey there! Hope you had a peaceful weekend

With only a few weeks left, things are really starting to get exciting in the lead up to the CTO Craft MiniCon on May 31st. You’ll be hearing all about the amazing speakers we’ve added over the next week, but to get the ball rolling, we interviewed Laura Tacho, who will be talking at the MiniCon on building Better Technical Assessments. Check out the link below.

There’s obviously still time to pick up your free ticket if you haven’t already - if you’re not able to attend live, register and we’ll send you the recordings to watch when you’re ready.

Get your ticket here

With that, on with the posts :)

Andy @ CTO Craft

Spotlight Q&A with Engineering Leadership Coach and VP of Engineering, Laura Tacho

Laura Tacho knows a thing or two about coaching and engineering and here she shares her views on bias in the hiring process, anonymous application screening and coaching for leadership development.

ctocraft.com • Share

CTO Craft MiniCon - The Complete Engineer Hiring Arc in 3 Hours

Demand from start-ups through to corporates is outstripping supply and pushing wage inflation and candidate rejections. Join us on May 31st for 3 hours of in-depth insights from some of the world’s leading experts in Hiring Engineers, and learn how they’ve sustained successful team growth through COVID and the Great Rethink.

conference.ctocraft.com • Share

From our Partners

O’Reilly Radar: Innovation in the Cloud is happening May 17!

Join some of the brightest minds in the industry to discover strategic ways to navigate cloud complexity while leveraging both anticipated and unforeseen opportunities. It’s free, but reservations are required and seats are limited.

Busy on May 17? Sign up and get the recording!

www.oreilly.com • Share

Reads of the Week

Three Summary Leadership Lessons From The One Minute Manager

The One Minute Manager is a classic book, written over 30 years ago, it has sold about 15 million copies. The book’s appeal is its simplicity as it takes some key management principles and distills them into a story that is simple to read and understand.

medium.com • Share

The 5 Dimensions of Organizational Success

Organizational success, like personal success and achievement, comes in many flavors. There are five dimensions we’ve found to be critical

shift314.com • Share

About our Partners

A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2022 - you’re all amazing!

AWS, CircleCI, Code Climate, Karat, O’Reilly, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, The Software House, iTechArt, LinearB, Lohika, Albany Partners, 101 Ways, PGS Software, Steamhaus, Swarmia

🥝 🥝 If you’re interested in reaching thousands of senior technology leaders and decision makers, drop a reply to this email to see our Partnership Opportunities! 🥝 🥝

Culture & People

The Basics

I’m not a process freak, but I do believe teams should have their house in order. You can get by with very little process overhead. Too many teams are spinning in circles (or sprints). It often isn’t their fault, but still…the level of reactivity is so draining.

cutlefish.substack.com • Share

How to Build a Culture of Ownership, and Other Engineering Leadership Tips from Plaid & Dropbox

Jean-Denis Grèze has led engineering teams at Plaid and Dropbox: Here’s what he’s learned about crafting a bottoms-up culture, hiring and motivating large teams.

review.firstround.com • Share

Untangling Organizational Dependencies

I’ve been thinking about a problem that may be a niche or less spoken about at the very least. The problem is how organizations learn to collaborate once the teams and departments move to product-based funding.

betterprogramming.pub • Share

Four Steps to Organizational Change Without the Drama

“Hey! Did you hear? They’re making Riley a manager.” You’ve been carefully planning this change for a while now. You want to get this right so you’ve taken the time to consider all the nuances of what this important change will mean for your team.

medium.com • Share

Leadership & Self-management

OKR Leadership: OKRs are not task lists

What are we going to build? This is the question that kicks off product conversations in most organizations. Managing to outputs is easy. It’s binary. You either shipped the feature or you didn’t. It’s the default way most organizations think about their work.

jeffgothelf.com • Share

Three Advanced Techniques for Working with Stakeholders

Working with stakeholders can be tough. Whether it’s sales, marketing, PR, legal, or finance, these folks tend to have strong opinions about the product, and they are often more senior or more influential than you. They certainly are better at negotiation, escalation, and corporate politics.

itamargilad.com • Share

Agreeably Disagreeing aka How to Handle Conflicts

The world is colored by a variety of personalities. It is wonderful in its diversity. However, this means that disagreements due to differing perspectives are bound to happen. It’s unavoidable but not insurmountable, as I realized fully during my years of working in customer service.

thoughtbot.com • Share

Feedback tips for the conflict-avoidant

My dad was so conflict-avoidant that he once chewed through half an avocado at a dinner party, even though he detested the things with a vengeance.

suzimcalpine.com • Share

Agile, Engineering & Product

The Mechanics of Software Evolution

Have you ever heard engineers in your team complain about only building “business features” and never doing any “tech work”? There are some ways in which this complain is legitimate, but I feel that there is an underlying unity to both these things.

kislayverma.com • Share

Continuous Load Testing

Building load test infrastructure is tricky and poses many questions.

slack.engineering • Share

Software engineering in-the-large: the coordination challenge

Back when I was an engineering student, I wanted to know “How do the big companies develop software? How does it happen in the real world?”

surfingcomplexity.blog • Share

How to Champion Investments to Improve Documentation

Documentation in and of itself is not an important business outcome. But there’s always a business outcome that improving documentation can help support, and we have to frame the investment in a way that aligns with that goal.

getdx.com • Share

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