6 min read

❄️ Killer Leadership, Career Frameworks, Decisions, Control -> Growth, Annual Planning: TMW #311 by CTO Craft

Hello there! Welcome to the week

We're already knee-deep in planning mode for 2023 here at CTO Craft, on the back of a year that's seen massive growth in the community from all corners of the world, two more brilliant conferences, and the reintroduction of our in-person London Bytes. Thanks to everyone who came along to our Festive Social event last Friday - hope you all had a brilliant time!

Do you have any feedback or suggestions for how CTO Craft can help you in your journey next year? We'd love to hear from you, just drop a reply to this email

Have a great week, see you soon

Andy @ CTO Craft

Zero to CTO – Jody Bailey, CTO at Stack Overflow is in the Spotlight

Zero to CTO – Jody Bailey, CTO at Stack Overflow is in the Spotlight

Jody Bailey has spent the last eight years of his nearly 30-year career on tech-leading EdTech software development teams.

Reads of the Week

Behind the Curtain: Understanding the Magic of ChatGPT

Behind the Curtain: Understanding the Magic of ChatGPT

I won’t be citing any examples here because there’s no need. You can run the tool yourself with topics you already know about. So let’s look at what’s going on under the hood. Mel Brooks’s Young…

From our Sponsors

Are you paid what you’re worth? Get the free O’Reilly 2022 Cloud Salary Survey report and see

Are you paid what you’re worth? Get the free O’Reilly 2022 Cloud Salary Survey report and see

How does your title, gender, state, age, or education impact your salary? Which cloud certifications are worth going for? How do your peers’ skills and salary compare to yours?

Try Before You Buy: Pentalog Outsourcing

Try Before You Buy: Pentalog Outsourcing

It takes great teams to build great software. Pentalog offers a special trial of our software outsourcing services that gives companies flexibility to scale teams and manage risks while remaining in control of their budget. Start working with top performers today, only pay if you’re happy after 30 days.

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, Swarmia, YLD

Culture & People

Your leadership can kill your culture - here’s how to avoid it

Your leadership can kill your culture - here’s how to avoid it

The intangible value of culture plays a big part in how a company can function. So, how can you ensure that you create and nurture a learning culture that gives your business an innovative edge?

What We Did Differently With Pleo’s Engineering Career Framework

What We Did Differently With Pleo’s Engineering Career Framework

By defining a career framework you define the jobs people can have in your organization. This quickly ripples into vital second and third-order implications around how your organization is structured, how information flows, and how people do their work.

Highly aligned, loosely coupled: How Shopify uses writing to get its 7,000+ employees on the same page

Highly aligned, loosely coupled: How Shopify uses writing to get its 7,000+ employees on the same page

Since its humble beginnings as an online snowboard shop in 2006, Shopify has grown to be the world’s biggest e-commerce platform with over 7,000 employees globally. Editor in Chief, Courtney Symons is keenly aware of the role writing has played in keeping the company on the right path as it grows.

27 Decision-making Techniques and Activities for Deciding Together

27 Decision-making Techniques and Activities for Deciding Together

In our groups and organizations, we want to move forward. We want to get things done, take action and change things in the world. To do that, we need to align on what we will do together, and how. In other words, we need to decide.

Recognition is not always about the public 'kudos' channel

Have you ever been asked "Do you feel recognised at work?" as part of an engagement survey perhaps from HR. It's a good question. We've known for at least 70 years that there is a connection between recognition and feeling motivated, appreciated and valued so its fair that HR might be interested if the company is getting it right.

Leadership & Self-management

How to Effectively Join a Startup as an Engineering Leader

How to Effectively Join a Startup as an Engineering Leader

The title does not matter. You can join as a Director of Engineering, VP of Engineering, CTO or Head of Engineering. What are you here for? What does the company expect from you? How can you set yourself up for success?

4 Ways To Elevate Your Leadership from Control to Growth

4 Ways To Elevate Your Leadership from Control to Growth

Leaders who feel the need to personally involve themselves in the minutia of the team’s operation rarely call themselves a “control freak”, but without realizing it, their need to control is impeding the very results they want so desperately to see.

Annual Planning in Uncertain Times: 6 Tactics for Rethinking Your Company’s End-of-Year Exercise

Annual Planning in Uncertain Times: 6 Tactics for Rethinking Your Company’s End-of-Year Exercise

While still hoping to give their team a final boost of motivation to hit those stretch goals before Q4 wraps up, many founders are undertaking the ritual of crafting plans for the next calendar year.

Doing “No” Better

tl;dr Sometimes the right response to a request is “No.” Maybe “Yes” and “No” are the wrong words, or the wrong responses, particularly if you’re trying to initiate a conversation.

Agile, Engineering & Product

The Never Events That Should Never Happen In Software Development

The Never Events That Should Never Happen In Software Development

Good development should be boring. You follow the process from start to finish to reduce mistakes and problems. Most developers focus on creating software, but good developers make sure they don’t…

Incident categories I’d like to see

Incident categories I’d like to see

If you’re categorizing your incidents by cause, here are some options for causes that I’d love to see used. These are all taken directly from the field of cognitive systems engineering research. All of us are so often working near saturation: we have more work to do than time to do it.

A debugging manifesto

I’ve been working on a zine about debugging for the last 6 months with my friend Marie, and one of the problems we ran into was figuring out how to explain the right attitude to take when debugging. We ended up writing a short debugging manifesto to start the zine with, and I’m pretty happy with how it came out.

ISO27001 2022: Everything you need to know

ISO27001 2022: Everything you need to know

In this article we lay bare the changes to the ISO 27001 standard that happened in 2022 - we show you exactly what changed in the ISO27001:2022 update

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy