🦞 Nearshoring, Holacracy, Unplugging, Availability Bias, Decision Trees, Blindspots: TMW #220 by CTO Craft

Hi there! Welcome to the week

This week's edition of TMW is absolutely packed, so just a short intro this time. I'll just leave you with one small request: if there's anyone you know who you think would benefit from subscribing, please do point them at TechManagerWeekly.com

With that, let's get on with the show! 😊

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Bytes

📆 Nearshoring: Problem Solving Not Body Leasing: Fri 18 Jun 2021 at 12:30 BST

Jerzy Dörfler, Solutions Architect at PGS Software, will share his own experiences, discuss common problems with nearshoring and show you that taking a step back and talking to your partner about the real problem, improves the overall experience.

Reads of the Week

6 data points about how the world’s top organizations test their software

Although there is no shortage of reports on overall software testing trends, the state of testing at the organizational level—particularly at “household name” brands—has historically been a black box. On the one hand, large organizations often have access to resources far beyond the reach of smaller businesses...

Improving Diversity and Inclusion: Discomfort, Empathy and Deeds

"I'd rather get it wrong than not do it at all". These words started a powerful initiative within housing association United Welsh in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. They came from Lynda Sagona, the chief executive, and led to a deep and impactful series of words and deeds.

About our Partners

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Culture & People

Is Holacracy Agile? Explaining Holacratic Organizational Structures

One of the basic principles of the Agile approach is the ability of employees and teams to self-organize – to make independent decisions that facilitate progress, teamwork, and the development of the organization in the desired direction.

What if you dread 1:1s with a direct report?

Through my years as a manager, I’ve been fortunate to work with truly amazing folks. I can count the number of people I’ve dreaded having 1:1s with on one hand.

The Secret to Motivating Long-time Employees

In today’s culture where people don’t stay at jobs longer than a few years, this might sound like an odd thing to focus on, however there are still plenty of ‘old-timers’ in companies and it’s important that they feel engaged and stay motivated. So what can you do?

PM & EM: Rules of Engagement

Picture this: you just landed the Product Management (PM) job of your dreams. On day one, you meet your partner-in-crime Engineering Manager (EM) at your new gig. Before you know it, you’ve been assigned your first problem to solve. Now, it’s time to get to work.

Leadership & Self-management

Every Excuse You’ve Ever Made for Not Unplugging on Vacation, Destroyed

I recently left the country. On vacation. It wasn’t like an on-the-run type of situation. And I did something that I’ve never been able to successfully do before—I didn’t check my email once.

The Availability Bias: How to Overcome a Common Cognitive Distortion

The availability heuristic explains why winning an award makes you more likely to win another award. It explains why we sometimes avoid one thing out of fear and end up doing something else that’s objectively riskier. It explains why governments spend enormous amounts of money mitigating risks we’ve already faced.

5 Rules of Coaching

I have found it useful to bear these in mind while I coach. I’ve passed them on in various forms to people who are learning how to be better leaders, and suggest that leaders pass them on too. These are contextual, which means… well, they’re not actually rules.

Can senior leaders make friends at work?

Chatting with a friend recently, they asked a question that I’ve spent time wondering about as well, “Can senior leaders have friends at work?” It’s reductive to pretend there’s one universal answer to this question, but most folks find it increasingly challenging to have friends at work a

Decision Tree Analysis: How to Make Effective Decisions

There’s a lot to learn from trees: with their roots firmly planted in the ground and branches reaching out in all directions, project managers can draw inspiration from these wonders of nature.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Product management in infrastructure engineering.

Recently a bunch of teams I work with have turned the corner, having paid down technical debt to a long-term sustainable level. The future unfurls with possibility. We can do anything. That’s exciting! It can also be pretty disorienting.

Developers Share How They Prevent and Manage Technical Debt

Developers deal with technical debt every day, and they know how to prevent and manage it better than anyone else. Here’s just some of what they had to say. Plenty of people have written about technical debt.

Blind Spot Discovery

To find blind spots, look at the assumptions your team makes about what they’re building and how they build it. Look at the pressures and constraints the team is under, too. Imagine what risks the team might be facing, and what they might falsely believe to be true, then investigate to see if your guess is right.

Data store migrations with no downtime

Data store migrations can be complex, especially if the application cannot afford to have maintenance downtime. We will explore some strategies that can help you navigate the complexity. In our case, it was a migration from a NoSQL data store, DynamoDB into a relational data store, MySQL.

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy