đ„ TCO, Team Onion, Leading by Example, Asking for Help, Hawthorne Effect, Roadmaps: TMW #271 by CTO Craft
Hello there, welcome to the week!
This Friday we welcome back the amazing Emily Webber, agile consultant and former Head of Agile Delivery at the Government Digital Service in the UK. She'll be walking us through her Team Onion methodology for team and process structuring - you don't want to miss it.
Don't forget, if you're in a senior technology leadership role we'd love to have you in the CTO Craft Slack community. We're over 4,000 people strong now and growing every day - it's a safe space to meet others in similar roles, get your questions answered quickly and learn from some of the best leaders in the world. It's also the best place to learn about our events, coaching, Circles and much more. If you or someone you know might be interested in joining, head over to the Community page and leave us your details - remember, we don't allow recruiters, sales or business development, marketing professionals or founders looking to hire CTOs to join the community.
That's it! Until next week
Andy @ CTO Craft
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CTO Craft Bytes
Fireside chat with Emily Webber, Fri 24 Jun 2022 at 12:30 BST
CTO Craft will be joined by Agile delivery and organisation consultant, trainer, coach, author, blogger and knitter, Emily Webber!
Emily will be sharing with us more about Team Onion. The Team Onion is a model to keep teams small, break down silos and create shared responsibility across team boundaries.
Reads of the Week
How to Lead by Example: A Practical Guide
Our whole life is full of moments that have impacted us, and some of them serve as inspiration for the actions we take day after day in our daily lives and also at work.
Employee Development: How to grow your employees when you canât promote them
Everywhere we look, work place research and leaders seem to be talking about how much employee development is valued by workers, and especially Millennials.
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Culture & People
Making a Compelling Offer â in this economy?
From Jacob's CTO Craft MiniCon keynote:
Itâs not uncommon for even entry-level positions to see a six-figure offer. Itâs pretty hard to hire a mid-career engineer, someone with 3-5 years of experience, for under $200,000. And weâre even seeing seven-figure offers like the one that my friend got. Thatâs still certainly an outlier, but not as much as they used to be.
Making it easier to ask for help
I used to co-lead workshops for engineering leaders, and in one portion, we would ask attendees, âWhat are the stories you make up that prevent you from asking for help?â The stories were abundant, with some extremely common, and some quite creative..
âSharing Interesting Stuffâ: A simple yet powerful management tool
Today, Iâd like to talk about a practice I introduced to the people I managed just a few weeks after joining Shipup. I didnât know it would turn out to be something so useful.
In Defense of Coding Interviews
The âtraditionalâ coding interview is structured such that a candidate gets a programming question, like âwrite a function to move all zeros in an array to the leftâ or âwrite a function to do level order traversal of a binary treeâ.
Leadership & Self-management
Software Engineering - The Soft Parts
Today I'll share some of the software engineering "soft skills" I've learned from my first 10 years on Google Chrome, where I am a Senior Staff Engineering Manager. On my 10th anniversary, I wanted to reflect on some of lessons that have stayed with me.
The Fallacy of Splitting Time
There's an illusion many people have around splitting time across projects. I see it all the time, and I often fall for it myself. Here's a simple example: There are two projects, both deemed important by the business, and both need a UI developer. Unfortunately, only one UI developer is available.
By Design
First start-up. Weâre between Layoff #2 and Layoff #3. Thereâs a new VP of Engineering running the show and while heâs been hired with the guidance to âturn the ship around,â the tech economy is a wreck and his first official act is throwing passengers overboard so we donât sink.
The Hawthorne Effect
Written before about employee turnover (and ideally reducing it), and now weâre going to add a new wrinkle to this whole deal: the Hawthorne Effect. Whatâs that, you ask? Good question.
How to improve the impact of your coaching questions
The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay-Stanier is a book that aims to simplify day-to-day coaching, especially for managers. A core part of coaching is asking good questions. In the book, Michael shares a number of actions we can take to improve the quality of our coaching questions.
Agile, Engineering & Product
What Senior Managers Want & Need from Roadmaps: Predictability and Options, Part 4
In Part 1, I said that product roadmaps are not like car roadmaps. But even car roadmaps showed places of interestâoptionsâfor the driver and passengers.
How fresh is your backlog?
Do you struggle with an overwhelming backlog? Do you count the number of product backlog items in your backlog in tens? hundred? or thousands?
Scaled Feature Factories
In interacting with companies that donât sell digital productsâbut who are investing heavily in digital capabilitiesâIâve noticed a pattern. Someone said you need a business rationale. So someone adds numbers.
Thatâs it!
If youâd like to be considered for the free CTO Craft Community, fill in your details here, and weâll be in touch!
https://ctocraft.com/community
Please do remember to share this link if you know of anyone whoâd like to receive TMW:
Have an amazing week!
Andy