🎯 Resilience, OKRs, Influence, Time Management, Chaos Engineering: TMW #184 by CTO Craft
Hello again!
Don't miss this week's CTO Craft Bytes panel on Engineering OKRs - we'll be joined by a CTO using OKRs successfully in a live setting, as well as an OKR consultant with experience helping development teams set them up.
📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Engineering OKRs in Practice - Fri, 16 October 2020 12:30 – 13:30 BST
Remember, all our previous Bytes are recorded and available on Crowdcast: https://crowdcast.io/ctocraft
Thanks as always to our Headline Partner, Amazon Web Services - if you’re interested in partnering, drop us a line!
Until next time
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Bytes - Engineering OKRs in Practice
This free panel discussion brought to you by CTO Craft will discuss how to implement OKRs into your engineering organisation. Find out about the benefits, who should be setting OKRs and stories about how it can all go wrong by implementing them badly.
Reads of the Week
The Ultimate Resilience Playbook for Technology Leaders - from CTO Craft
With the burnout phenomenon growing in technology, mastering resilience has never been more needed. Now you can with this ultimate playbook for leaders.
The demise of the ‘Hero Leader’: Six truths about leadership in the digital age
The digital economy has radically changed the way many of us now work - including organisational leaders. The top-down, ‘hero’ approach of leadership that worked in the industrial age is no longer fit for purpose and digital leaders need different methodologies.
Why everything breaks when you reach 25 employees
Congratulations! Your company is growing and you’ve hired a great team. They’ve helped take your fledgling idea and make it more than just a reality, but a bonafide business with revenue that requires commas, an office, and passionate, happy customers.
From our Partners
Now Go Build - From AWS
Join Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels on a worldwide journey to uncover the startups solving the toughest problems our planet faces.
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Culture & People
Slack launches the Future Forum to create a better way to work
Slack is launching the Future Forum, a consortium that will help companies make the transformations necessary to thrive in the new economy. The Future Forum is dedicated to the concept that companies need to make a comprehensive shift in how they operate.
6 red flags I saw while doing 60+ technical interviews in 30 days
The goal of this article is also not to make you paranoid and be on the hunt for red flags in your next interview, far from it. Rather the goal is to equip you with knowledge to help you immediately identify exactly the same or similar red flags in your next interview, and hopefully identifying them will set you up to better handle them.
Job Page Grader
Andy says: "This is a great tool to run your public job specs through, which checks for positivity, readability and gender bias, among other things"
Salaries & Benefits Dashboard
Andy says: "Wondering how some of the bigger tech organisations compensate their people? This is a great interactive data explorer containing data from many of the most visible tech businesses in the world"
Leadership & Self-management
Being Smart is Not Enough
When hiring a team, we tend to favor the geniuses who hatch innovative ideas, but overlook the butterflies, the crucial ones who share and implement them. Here’s why it’s important to be both smart AND social. In business, it’s never enough to have a great idea.
How to Lead with Influence Instead of Authority
One of the things you read most often about the effects of the pandemic is that it has accelerated trends that were already in play by about 10 years. In certain aspects of work and life, it suddenly seems like 2030 instead of 2020.
Time management: a guide for managers
Between overseeing direct reports and attending meetings, you barely have the time to work on deliverables – let alone address your own personal and professional development. With all these competing demands, how can you perform the duties of a good manager, while managing your time in a way that’s both productive and sustainable to your wellbeing?
Cleaning House: 5 Leadership Messes to Clean Up Before You Let the Neighbors In
My doorbell rang unexpectedly last week. With zero notice, the person on the front step wanted to come in and look around. My heart skipped a beat; “was my place presentable” I asked myself? That got me thinking.
Why to Start Public Speaking as a Manager in Tech
I attend a fair amount of tech conferences, and there's often something missing: talks from managers and leadership in tech. In this post I explain how public speaking benefits tech leaders and why this is an important need for IT and software communities.
Agile, Engineering & Product
The Abyss of Ignorable: A Route into Chaos Testing from Starling Bank
The hostility of cloud environments was a gift for resilient architecture and inspired chaos engineering which may outlive the unpredictability that inspired it. Chaos engineering is acquiring the rigour and trappings of a discipline, but the key insights are still simple and powerful.
Lessons interviewing 200+ engineers: the perfect process to manage tech debt
I’ve discovered what many companies are missing and compiled my learnings into a simple but powerful framework, to share with you.
The System Bites Back
One of the thorny challenges when attempting to improve a system optimized for high WIP, is that it is almost never as simple as “visualize work and lower WIP!” Nor is it always about factors external to the team. Expect deep, and seemingly irrational resistance.
7 Best Practices on How to Build a Product Roadmap
The end of 2015 is nearing and it’s product roadmap building time again—at least for those companies that are still dedicated to the old command-and-control model.
What Else?
12+ Icebreakers to kick off your next Zoom meeting
Breaking the ice? Warming up the crowd? Whatever you call it, it can make your collaboration more successful and perhaps a bit more fun.
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