🍓 Stakeholders, Burnout, Peer Reviews, Coaching, OKRs, Feedback, North Korea: TMW #214 by CTO Craft

Hello there!

There are still spaces available in our first Canada/US Mentoring Circle - if you're interested in learning more, drop me a reply to this email and we'll get a chat in the diary.

This week's Bytes event is all about data and scale - if you're in the process of introducing a data function, this is well worth attending.

📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Delivering Agile Data Engineering and Science at Scale, Thu 13 May 2021 at 18:00 BST

Our expert speakers will discuss scaling, managing the pace of model delivery, measuring impact and aligning stakeholders, as well as the importance of creating high quality data at the engineering level.

Inspired by Stack Overflow’s rule that questions should have a single right answer or they are archived for being ‘primarily opinion-based', CTO Craft is collaborating with Skiller Whale to produce a new podcast. Primarily Context-Based is the Tech Leader’s Guide to questions with more than one right answer - each episode covering a different topic with a variety of technology leaders sharing their expertise. I joined Skiller Whale's Hywel Carver for the very first episode, on team efficiency metrics and continuous improvement - check it out below!

Until next time

Andy @ CTO Craft

How do I measure tech team efficiency? feat. Andy Skipper of CTO Craft

CTO Craft and Skiller Whale present the Tech Leader’s guide to questions with more than one right answer. In episode one, Andy Skipper and Hywel Carver discuss, evaluate and scrutinise the thorny issue of how to measure tech team efficiency.

Reads of the Week

Dangerous animals of product management: How to manage challenging stakeholders

Picture this: You are a forward-thinking product manager with a clear product vision, strategy, and roadmap. Yet throughout the product management process, stakeholders come to the table with unvalidated requests. “This must be built”, they insist, “and right away”.

How Bad Managers Lead To Burnout

In my role as a burnout advisor and coach, I hear countless stories of people’s struggle with burnout, and one aspect I am seeing quite a spike in the cause of their burnout, is the environment where they work.

From our Partners

Don’t Get Hacked! Make Your IT Projects Secure - from PGS Software

Join IT’s Live #Security and learn how to organise your source code, production environment, repositories, tools, cloud access, and more.

About our Partners

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

AWS, Code Climate, CircleCI, Indiespring, LinearB, Honeycomb, 101 Ways, Albany Partners, YLD, iTechArt, Wynter, The Scale Factory, PGS and Skiller Whale

🥝 🥝  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

Want to build a more diverse engineering team? You need a low anxiety hiring process

Andy says: "Brilliantly detailed breakdown of a startup hiring framework that works for both the hirers and candidates by CTO Craft member and speaker Neil Cameron"

How to Write a Peer Performance Review

It’s that time of year: performance reviews. You’re concerned about your own performance review process, what your manager(s) might say, and potentially whether you’ll be eligible for a pay increase, bonus, or promotion.

Basecamp and the Social Forces Behind So Many Public Implosions

A lot can happen in a week these days. You can share updated company policies on a Monday and, by that Friday, over a third of your staff can have resigned.

Feedback is a Mirror

You have an internal storyteller, and they are always telling you a story. Today the story is, “Almost done with all of my bugs. There were ten at the beginning of the week, but now I have three. One of them is hard, but I’ll figure it out. The other, I’m sure, will be a breeze.

Leadership & Self-management

How Coaching Can Help You Move from Crisis Management to Crisis Leadership

Leaders always have known that uncertainty in the world, the workplace, and personal lives makes shepherding an enterprise or team a daunting and complex challenge.

Stop Asking ‘What’s Your Management Style?’

What’s your management style? It’s a tricky question to answer well.

The first red flag of burnout: Chronic exhaustion

A bit like a candle burning down, burnout is a slow burn. It doesn’t happen overnight. That’s one of the challenges in spotting it. But learning to identify the early-stage signs helps us reduce the chances of burnout going undetected.

OKRs top-down? bottom-up? or ripples in a pond?

One of the great things about writing a book is that you get a greater understanding of the subject. So it was with “Succeeding with OKRs in Agile”. In particular writing the book forced me to think about how OKRs fitted with agile and hierarchal structures.

Compassion Shows in Your Work

Have you ever been a teacher? Did you ever become angry at a student for turning in sloppy work, or at a spouse or child for leaving their dirty laundry everywhere?

Agile, Engineering & Product

Measuring Productivity by Ron Lichty

Never, ever, ever, let story points or velocity be used as a performance metric. In fact, don’t share points and velocity outside the team.

I could build this during the weekend

Every time people buy a new house, car, or TV, they say lovely things first. It's the honeymoon phase. Then, they realize their expensive, fancy stuff has flaws too. Engineers tend to take it one step further.

Identify Creative Solutions To Help Your Team Ship Faster

The ability of a Scrum Team to ship fast is a key indicator of their success. If they are able to ship fast, it means they can quickly validate if the product has the right features. And, if the features and underlying technology work as expected.

What Else?

Meet Miko, the virtual Twitch streamer operated by a real-life gamer known only as "The Technician"..

Says The Technician: "My income tripled the day I put in this interaction where the audience could kill me. When I added the nuke and the mute—where the audience could mute me for 30 seconds—I was able to afford my rent and pay off my debt slowly.”

The Incredible Rise of North Korea’s Hacking Army

Shimomura was a member of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest yakuza crime family in Japan. When one of his superiors asked him if he wanted to make a pile of fast money, he naturally said yes. It was May 14, 2016, and Shimomura was living in the city of Nagoya.

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