Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #164
Hi there!
We have an amazing line-up of Bytes events over the coming weeks - check out our Events page for more info; we'll be announcing new events constantly in the CTO Craft Slack, including Ask-Me-Anything events which are only available to members of the community, like the one we ran last week with Marc Adler.
Coming up:
📅 CTO Craft Online Discussion - Tech Vision and Strategy - May 28th 2pm BST
📅 CTO Craft Bytes - Successful Remote Hiring - Jun 5th 12.30pm BST
📅 CTO Craft Bytes - Dealing with Burnout - Jun 5th 12.30pm BST
📅 CTO Craft Bytes - Neuroscience and Motivation - Jun 5th 12.30pm BST
See you there!
Andy @ CTO Craft
Pick of the Week
CTO Craft - Crowdcast
You can see recordings of all our Bytes events and register to be notified about new ones on the Crowdcast page. Recordings so far include
- AWS Cost Optimisation
- Job Hunting for CTOs
- Navigating Uncertainty
- When and How to Build a Data and Analytics Team
Culture & People
Motivating a Team Takes More Than Money
To get the most from your team, focus on the human needs of the individuals that comprise it. After a full day of attending to customers frustrations, concerns, and needs, a shoe company’s customer service representatives say they leave the call center tired but fulfilled.
Avoiding Employee Burnout: How to Help You & Your Team Thrive in Quarantine
Employee burnout is a common problem, especially with coronavirus causing massive change & disruption. Learn the challenges + how to prevent employee burnout.
Virtual team building: How to build trust in a remote team
You want your team to feel connected remotely… but how do you do it without cheesy games and activities? Here are 8 ways to get virtual team building right. Virtual team building is top of mind for you.
The Office Is Dead
In early March, Jeff Haynie, the CEO of Austin-based software company Pinpoint, was gearing up to find new office space. Pinpoint’s $25,000-per-month lease with WeWork for 1,800 square feet would be up in August, and it was time to move on.
“Bursty” Communication Can Help Remote Teams Thrive
Working from home is becoming more mainstream, but large employers are starting to wonder whether remote work actually stifles innovation and productivity. Can remote teams achieve the productivity of the office and still allow the convenience of working at home?
Leadership & Self-management
From Zero to CTO - Kevin Goldsmith
Chief Technology Officer of Onfido Kevin Goldsmith tells CTO Craft about his experiences as a new technology leader, the skills he had to develop, what works for him now and where he's headed over the next five years
3 Leadership Styles to Improve Your Developer Team’s Performance
Mastering the basic leadership styles is essential to running a great team. Whatever your leadership level or team size may be, you build everything on this foundation.
How OKR Helped Gmail Reach 1 Billion Users: an Interview with Itamar Gilad
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Tell Me How You Measure Me
In one of my last posts, I’ve mentioned metrics as a tool I use to manage both up and down. Since then, I got a few questions about which metrics I usually track and how I use them. Metrics are an essential part of engineering management for me, so here are the details.
Remote brainstorming for regular humans
When going remote, we habitually forget much of what makes us effective in person. Working in the completely different, and at times frustrating, setting of remote sessions may entice us to find expensive, complicated tools to solve our problems.
Agile, Engineering & Product
How Agile Can Work Together with Deadlines
Even with a hard deadline, you can still prioritise work in sprints, use daily stand ups to manage blockers, and run retrospectives to improve your ways of working. Stakeholder relationships are key when attempting to negotiate and soften arbitrary deadlines.
Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake
Most of us in the software industry have been asked over and over to participate in predictive planning for software projects. Predictive planning is the flawed idea that software projects lend themselves to being planned out like a construction project, using a tool like a Gantt chart.
Dark Patterns: Past, Present, and Future
Dark patterns are user interfaces that benefit an online service by leading users into making decisions they might not otherwise make. Some dark patterns deceive users while others covertly manipulate or coerce them into choices that are not in their best interests.
How LinkedIn handles merging code in high-velocity repositories
The product ecosystem at LinkedIn is vast, and managing its infrastructure can be daunting. Nearly 10 years ago, we transitioned away from a single monolithic codebase toward a microservice architecture, allowing teams to manage their own repositories.
What Else?
How to Search and Find Layoff Lists Online
With so many companies furloughing and laying off employees it’s a good time to search and find active talent open for their next opportunity. As Recruiters, we are researchers, so I wanted to give some tips and tricks for finding layoff lists or announcements online.
That’s it!
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Have an amazing week!
Andy