🐫 London Event, Surviving the C-Suite, Toxic Work Cultures, CTO vs VPE, Engineering Roadmaps: TMW #303 by CTO Craft

Howdy! Welcome to the week

Just a short intro this week, and a reminder to check out our next Bytes London event, happening on the evening of November 10th on Charing Cross Road. We'll be hosting a panel chatting about the benefits of building a professional network as a CTO, and ways to go about it. Grab your free spot below.

Don't forget - prices for CTO Craft Con Winter 2022 will be going up on November 6th, so do jump in if you're planning to come along. You can see everything we have lined up here: https://conference.ctocraft.com. It's going to be a blast!

See you next week

Andy @ CTO Craft

Bytes London - Networks for Tech Leaders: Creating, Using and Nurturing Tickets, Thu 10 Nov 2022 at 18:00

In celebration of CTO Craft Con Winter 2022, happening 14th - 16th November, we’re hosting an in-person Bytes on 10th November at ARBORETUM, London. Join us for an informative evening with experts and networking.

Whether you’re part of the C-suite or you deal with C-suite members, building your network inside and outside of your own business is a fundamental part of your role as a senior technology leader.

CTO Craft Bytes

Elephant Carpaccio - Measuring Team Productivity, Thu 3 Nov 2022 at 16:00 GMT

In this conversation, the software executive and author Alberto Silveira, HoE at Lawnstarter, expands on an innovative concept that he calls Elephant Carpaccio, an efficient way of slicing the work into valuable delightful pieces, where all the great work teams produce can be measured and not just code deployed.

From the CTO Craft Blog

Welcome to the C-suite! How do CTOs succeed at the leaders’ table?

Welcome to the leadership team CTOs! But how do you successfully integrate yourself as a technology leader into the C-suite?

From our Sponsors

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How To Attract and Retain More Women and Non-Binary People In The Workplace - from YLD

There's an increase in women and non-binary talent in tech, and businesses do much better when they're on board.

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

Toxic work cultures truly rot from the head

I got the chart above from this Stowe Boyd newsletter, which is in turn from here via MIT. It’s funny because MIT has apparently developed a little chubby for discussing toxic workplaces; I wrote about another study they did re: “The Great Resignation."

The Big Tech Hiring Slowdown Is Here and it will Hurt

I collated the total number of reported layoffs across tech companies through 2022 to date, using the layoffs tracker site, Layoffs.fyi. In total, 92,558 layoffs have been reported in this database for this year, at the time when this article published.

Add skills not people to your cross-functional teams

Balancing roles vs. skills in your cross-functional teams. Communication overhead increases as the number of people increases. Due to combinatorial explosion, the number of different communication channels increases rapidly with the number of people.

This simple team activity builds psychological safety.

Your team is highly unlikely to access high performance when psychological safety is low. When it comes to high performance, that sense of safety is simply table-stakes; an enabler. Most people think psychological safety is about creating happy teams.

Leadership & Self-management

The VPE & CTO roles

The VP of Engineering (VPE) and Chief Technical Officer (CTO) titles are ones which, I have found, oftentimes to be used interchangeably. The reality, again based on my own experience, is that they are different roles. While they do overlap, they each have distinct responsibilities.

Virtual Leadership: Empower Distributed Augmented Teams

Nowadays, it’s not just the data that’s distributed! The appeal, and necessity, for businesses to build and work with distributed teams is on the rise, and all indications are that this remote working trend will continue to grow.

The Engineering Manager’s Tools

I’ve been writing about how to use systems thinking in software engineering management. I want to continue addressing a practical point: how to make change happen as an Engineering Manager (EM). One of the realities of being an EM is that you constantly work on improving your team’s situation.

Bucketing your time

This article is part of a series on managing managers. Life as an IC, or as a manager of ICs, usually follows a predictable cadence. Perhaps you plan your time and your activities around fixed periods such as sprints.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Engineering Team Roadmaps

Most roadmaps for engineering teams commit the sin of only including new features and functionality. This does a major disservice to the engineering team. I had a colleague that used to repeat a phrase about 90% of the cost of software was the operating and maintenance rather than the building.

My take on why goal cascades are harmful and what to do instead

As long as it’s more than one person AND it’s important that we achieve some collective goal THEN we need some way of facilitating coherent action across an organisation. Without coherence, you’ll see a lot of duplicate, competing, or missing efforts.

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