Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #154

Howdy!

The last few slots are still available in the second Circle, due to kick off in late March - if you’d like to be a part of that, or future Circles, leave your details here and we’ll be in touch: Mentoring Circles

We're also rapidly filling a Circle specifically for people in North and South America; if this is of interest, drop me a reply to this email, or check out the Circles page for some more info and to sign up

Until next week!

Andy Skipper

Reads of the Week

Morale, Mental Health, and Burnout in Remote Teams

In a distributed team, it’s much harder for a manager to get an informal pulse for morale and mental health. You can’t manage by walking around; you don’t see who’s staying late or leaving early, who eats lunch alone at their desk, or who seems unusually withdrawn or dejected.

How to Save a Dying, Low-Morale Team

At a point in my career, I was the manager for a team at a global tech company. I had originally joined the team as an individual contributing software engineer, and when I did, the team was at a size of 8. But when I joined, I didn’t know the team was in trouble.

From Zero to CTO: Marta Jasinska is in the spotlight

I started my career back in 2006 as a J2ME engineer developing mobile games. I moved to the UK in 2008 to work on browser based action games in Brighton but quickly switched to a role in the much more stable world of e-commerce where I focused on back end web services development.

Culture & People

How to coach employees? Ask these 1-on-1 meeting questions

The key to coaching employees lies in a single, straightforward choice: The 1-on-1 meeting questions you choose to ask. You may be raising an eyebrow at this. Surely, you’ve heard enough hype about how “you need to be holding one-on-ones as a leader.

Beyond Self-Organization: How To Energize People & Teams

In this hands-on workshop with Michael Sahota, you will learn how employee disengagement is a common challenge. We outline practical steps to diagnose and create experiments to foster a higher performance work environment.

Handling Unplanned Work

Technical teams who are building or supporting application software usually work from a prioritized list of improvements, new features, and ideas to try out. (Scrum calls the list the Product Backlog.) They have a plan for completing the items on the list.

How to run a successful team retreat

This was a first for us: We held a team retreat for Know Your Team. Though we’ve been in business for the past five years, we’d never had an official team retreat.

10 Signs your team is not set up for success

Successful teams are essential for organisational success. No significant outcome is achieved by one person alone these days. All change efforts involve groups of people, sometimes large groups. And these groups need to function as a cohesive unit — a team — for it to be fully successful.

Leadership & Self-management

Leadership at Every Level: Practices for Aligned Autonomy

Matthew Philip connects the philosophy of intent-based leadership with practices that enable one to realize the benefits of aligned autonomy, regardless of where it is found in the org chart.

Tech Leadership: The Work Is Not the Work

Tech executives, especially those coming from a substantial hands-on background, naturally gravitate towards focusing on rote delivery. In my work, I often see clients toting grandiose roadmaps that boil down to “we will do what Product has asked,” but less succinctly.

Outdated and Dysfunctional: Leadership Styles in Today’s Workplace

“How would you describe your leadership style?” I was asked this question by a colleague and it caused me to think deeply and reflect.

Burnout in Technology Leadership (And What to Do About It)

For all the ways in which technology dominates business news and business blogs, it’s surprising that people are not talking more about a very pervasive problem: Burnout in technology leadership. Solid leadership is needed in order to maintain a positive company culture.

44 engineering management lessons

Welcome to engineering management. It’s fun, it’s exhausting, it’s rewarding — but most importantly it’s new! What worked for you before won’t work now. You’ll have to acquire a new set of skills, and shed some bad habits in the process. Here is a short guide to get you started.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Why Manage WIP?

Having too much Work in Process, also known as Work in Progress (WIP), is a remarkably common issue. In my experience, management often encourages this behavior. I don’t know if it is the notion that we will get more done if we work on more things simultaneously.

How Big Technical Changes Happen at Slack

Note that these phases are a descriptive model, not prescriptive. We’re not forcing adoption to follow this sigmoid curve; it just naturally must, no matter how we wish things were.

How to Become a Great Software Architect

Software architecture is very simple: You only have to split up one system and use modern approaches such as DDD or Microservices. This presentation shows completely different qualifications that a good software architect must have.

Lean Portfolio Management

This week in LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, Tina Wang spends some time with Dave talking about Lean Portfolio Management. During the conversation, Tina and Dave cover exactly what Lean Portfolio Management is and how it differs from a more traditional approach to Portfolio Management.

What Else?

Reconciling Tech and Business

If there is a never-ending theme in software organizations, it’s the mutual misunderstanding and frustration between business and tech. On the business side, tech is never fast enough.....

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy