🥒 Succession Planning, Pace and Stress, Recognition, Designing a Tech Org, Quality vs Speed: TMW #285 by CTO Craft
Hello there!
Guess what - we've nearly filled the agenda for November's CTO Craft Con, and it's looking absolutely amazing. Thanks to everyone who's been in touch with recommendations for talks or speakers, or to offer their own talks. We'd love to feature every single one of you, but that would be an incredibly long conference. However, even if you can't join the line-up for the first two days of talks, you can always put your name down for the third day's unconference - more news on that shortly....
Get your early bird tickets here
In other news, we'll shortly be resuming our in-person Bytes in London! The first free session will be on September 8th, at Aviation House in Holborn, and we'll be joined by some of the best fractional and interim CTOs to give us some depth on how they forged a career, common mis-steps, ways to build awareness and leads, and much more. More details just below
Until next week!
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Bytes
Bytes London: Plotting The Interim CTO Path, Thu 8 Sep 2022 at 18:00 in Holborn, London
We're thrilled to be hosting our first in person event after a long hiatus.
Alongside Albany Partners, we'll be hosting a panel discussion featuring Meri Williams - legendary CTO and NED, Alfonso Ferrandez - fractional CTO and co-founder at UREGO, and David Mackey - Director of Interim at Albany Partners.
Bytes: CTO Fundamentals - CTO Tactics, Fri 2 Sep 2022 at 12:30
What makes a CTO more successful than others? Is it down to skill or is there a universal mindset agnostic to the development stage of the organisation? Or guiding maturity models? Are there any bulletproof principles that work for every company?
Reads of the Week
What if I vanished?
I get this question fairly often. How would the projects I run manage if I took off? And really, the primary project people think of then is of course curl. How would the curl project manage if I took a forever vacation starting now?
In-Depth: The Science On Sustainable Pace, Stress, And Motivation
How sustainable is your pace as a developer? This has always been a huge struggle for us and most of the teams we’ve been part of. We’ve often found ourselves working late into the night, or during weekends.
From our Sponsors
O'Reilly Cloud Labs
With O’Reilly, your teams can now gain hands-on cloud experience and build the expertise that every organization needs to thrive using safe environments right from their browser to learn from any mistakes and recognize how to solve real business problems.
GDPR Assessment for CTOs - from Pentalog
In most of the CTO assessments, the CTO says GDPR is a weak spot (if not the weakest spot) and recommending sources to study, training, or guidance isn’t difficult. But how does a CTO know they have captured the requirements of GDPR?
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, Steamhaus, Swarmia, YLD
Culture & People
When it comes to burnout, what’s the latest – and what’s working?
We can’t blame Covid for all our burnout woes. But it certainly hasn’t helped. As Ben Laker and his co-authors say in their recent HBR article, “If there’s one thing that the pandemic has made obvious, it’s that burnout is a global problem.” So what have we learnt?
The Battle for Talent can be Won with Employee Recognition
The key to retention in the workforce is meaningful recognition. Meaningful recognition requires stating how an employee specifically moved the needle, embodies unique characteristics and made a monumental difference.
How to hire for Director+ roles?
Hiring folks in leadership roles is very challenging. One difficulty is that almost every candidate who gets to that level is generally good at communication, charismatic in their demeanor, and well trained to say the right things to get the job.
An Engineering Manager's Bill of Rights (and Responsibilities)
In 2018, Honeycomb co-founder & CTO Charity Majors wrote a blog post titled, “An Engineer’s Bill of Rights (and Responsibilities).” We’ve recently updated and reposted it.
Designing a Technology Organization
Today we will discuss how to organize a high-performing technology organization within a business. We will discuss the key verticals you likely will need in your business, important tenets for how you run the technology organization and common pitfalls that I’ve both seen others and myself make.
Leadership & Self-management
What to ask during a VP of Engineering interview
In my previous post, I wrote about what to expect as a candidate during an interview for a VP of Engineering position. This post covers what you, as a candidate, should be asking during the interview.
Authentic Leadership Explained
Leaders are not born, they are made. Anyone can become a great leader if they have the right mindset and skill set. Sahin Appel explains what Authentic Leadership according to Bill George is and how you can benefit from it.
5 Lessons About Employee Wellbeing For Leaders
The pandemic triggered a 25% increase in prevalence of anxiety and depression, worldwide. As managers, we are facing an unprecedented period. Almost everyone has lost something over the last couple of years. If not a close person, then certainty and predictability in our lives.
The Skill of Org Design
I built my first organisation when I was in high school. It was a debate club, and it died the instant I graduated and left for university. I remember looking back on the experience and thinking to myself: “Hmm, this is interesting. How do you build an org that outlasts you?”
Anticipate Problems with a Scenario Planning Exercise
If you’ve read our complete guide to retrospectives and post-mortems, you already know how important it is to bring your team together to discuss how to be more effective in the future. But you don’t have to wait until the end of a project to start trouble-shooting.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Technical Evaluation of a Startup
In February 2021 I was asked to do a technical evaluation of a startup. The team had 7-10 engineers but lacked senior technical leadership, and the investment team and CEO wanted to make sure they were on track.
The False Trade-off Between Quality and Speed
One of the main risks that a growing software engineering team faces is a decrease in the team’s productivity.
Shorten Team Feedback Loops with These Three Questions to Increase Throughput
The longer the work takes, the more pressure managers exert on the team and the product leader. (Teams and product leaders might exert pressure on themselves, too. But I mostly see external pressure.)
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:
Have an amazing week!
Andy