Aug 23, 2021

🛵 Servant Leadership, Low-risk Learning, Employee Retention, Post-incidents, Support-Driven Development: TMW #230 by CTO Craft

By Andy @ CTO Craft • Issue #230 • View online

Hello again!

We’re hosting our first Successful 1:1s workshop later today - don’t worry if you weren’t able to pick up a ticket this time, as we’re planning to run it again very shortly. Watch this space!

If you’re interested in contributing a blog post or appearing in one of our CTO Craft Bytes sessions, please drop me a line; we’re particularly interested in hearing from you if you’ve solved team and process problems while scaling an engineering team, or if you’ve built out a new delivery methodology, implemented an innovative hiring or onboarding plan, or if you’ve recently hired your first second-in-command / VP Engineering.

See you next time!

Andy @ CTO Craft

From the CTO Craft Blog

The Top Four Priorities for 1:1s

Learn how to make your one-to-ones more successful by considering your approach and prioritising these four key actions.

ctocraft.com • Share

Reads of the Week

How to Influence Without Authority

Andy says: “Positioned for Product Managers, but all of the advice here is relevant for any leader, including CTOs - well worth a read!”

As a Product Manager, you are working within a discipline that exists at the intersection of many other functions (design, engineering, analytics, marketing, finance, etc), but rarely have these disciplines directly reporting to you.

medium.com • Share

What is Servant Leadership?

Kjell Tore Guttormsen, a Management 3.0 Facilitator and a Servant Leader at heart, shares his view on “Servant Leadership” and what it means to become a Servant Leader. In addition, we asked our LinkedIn followers about their take on Servant Leadership.

management30.com • Share

About our Partners

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

AWS, O'Reilly, Karat, CircleCI, Indiespring, Skiller Whale, iTechArt, LinearB, PGS Software, 101 Ways, The Software House, Albany Partners, The Scale Factory

🥝 🥝 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

Shipping fast and safe: Building a culture of low-risk learning

It breathes life into your engineering team, and teams across the company, as customer issues and requests are resolved quickly and efficiently. But here’s the caveat: you can’t just ship fast, you have to make sure your team is equipped to ship safely.

www.intercom.com • Share

How to Build a Cross-Functional Team

Cross-functional teams are more or less a no-brainer for some projects. Here are a few dos and don’ts to keep in mind when building a team that works.

dzone.com • Share

Patterns in confusing explanations

Hello! Recently I’ve been thinking about why I explain things the way I do. The usual way I write is: So why do I find all these explanations so confusing? I decided to try and find out! I came up with a list of 12 patterns that make explanations hard for me to understand.

jvns.ca • Share

Why every software engineering interview should include ops questions

Our industry has gotten very good at pressing operations engineers to get better at writing code, writing tests, and software engineering in general these past few years. Which is great! But we have not been nearly so good at pushing software engineers to level up their systems skills. Which is unfortunate, because it is just as important.

charity.wtf • Share

The 3 Stay Conversations: The best way to improve employee retention

Improve employee retention by having these three one-on-one meetings with your staff once a month. We all want to improve employee retention. The question is how? Our knee-jerk answers to this question can feel opaque.

knowyourteam.com • Share

Leadership & Self-management

How to Overcome the Technical Strategy Spiral

Organizations are always seeking great engineering leaders — leaders who do more than just execute strategy. They shape it with their unique perspective on technology. And they find ways for technology to drive the strategy: educating peers on what is possible, guiding the roadmap to increase efficiency and value, generating innovation, and making strategic decisions about execution.

www.reforge.com • Share

Running Leadership Meetings with Purpose

Andrew Waitman is the CEO of Asscent Compliance, a global leader in supply chain management and one of Canada’s top growing countries. In this episode, we will dive into why running leadership meetings with purpose comes with exploring the victories, insights, and puzzles of business.

fellow.app • Share

Leaders, Don’t Be Afraid to Talk About Your Fears and Anxieties

“I realize my boundaries are blurred, but I don’t know how to handle everything on my plate. There is a lot to do and a lot to take care of … The team looks for so much in terms of guidance, direction, energy, ideas, structure … I feel like I am carrying the weight of it all.

hbr.org • Share

Check Your Work, Ask for Help, and Slow Down

The quality of your decisions is the currency of leadership. It starts easy. The stakes are low. There is a legion of leaders around you who understand you’ve just begun, so when they see the decision in front of you, they proactively offer helpful advice.

randsinrepose.com • Share

Agile, Engineering & Product

The Post-Incident Review

Once an incident is resolved, there is a tendency to move on and go back to normal daily work. This is a missed opportunity to gather critical learnings and understand true system behavior as well as process and system breakdowns.

itrevolution.com • Share

Support Driven Development

Are you Practising Support Driven Development? If you are reading this then the answer is probably no. Or, you may think you are, but certain decisions that have been made (or not made) in the development of your product have made it much more difficult for you and your staff to support.

youngleaders.tech • Share

The Politics of Choosing a Tech Stack

Would you choose a tech stack to pad your résumé? Do you know someone who overbuilds in the name of professional development? I ask because I’ve been spending a lot of time recently with Kubernetes, the container orchestrator and cool kid of the DevOps world.

medium.com • Share

Why Agile Estimation Methods are Flawed — and what to do about it.

Information Cascade — A group dynamics phenomenon where one person can influence the rest of the group during decision making. I’d say that there are two ways this can happen — power differential and anchoring.

medium.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:

http://www.techmanagerweekly.com

Have an amazing week!

Andy