Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #178

Hey there, happy Monday!

There's some new content over on the CTO Craft blog - check out the links below! We're looking for contributors, as always, so please do reach out if you'd like to write something for the blog, or get involved in some events.

Keep your eyes peeled for some CTO Craft Bytes events over the next few weeks - we've got some amazing panelists lined up!

Thanks as always to our Headline Partner, Amazon Web Services - if you’re interested in partnering, drop us a line!

Until next time

Andy @ CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

Who do I delegate to? A CTO's guide to developing leaders - from CTO Craft

Discover how to identify, nurture and delegate to natural leaders within your team in three stages - a must-have CTO's guide.

Meaningful Slack Alerts for Software Development Teams

As an engineering team lead at a software company it’s my responsibility to fence distractions and make sure my developers are focused on the goals of the sprint. Too much noise from the business or tools can cause interruptions in our workflows and defocus the team from our priorities.

From our Partners

Bridge the IT Gap Today - from AWS

Explore this AWS eBook to learn why the skills gap is often so difficult to close, understand the challenges with recruiting versus training IT talent and enable successful transformation through your Cloud Foundation Team.

🥝 🥝 If you’re interested in seeing our Partnership Opportunities, drop a reply to this email! 🥝 🥝

Culture & People

What is the true cost of your hiring process? - from CTO Craft

If you were making an emergency/last-minute hire and had to drop one step from your hiring process, which step would you remove? Why? How much damage would it do to your business – and what could you do to offset that cost? Most people cannot answer these questions, revealing that their hiring pro

How I Taught the ‘Team from Hell’ to Trust Each Other

Virtual team coaching can help turn around dysfunctional teams. Effective organisations rely on teamwork, not least because it facilitates problem solving. Many leaders, however, are ambivalent about teams.

There’s a big difference between a team and a working group.

There’s a big difference between a team and a working group. Unfortunately, creating a team isn’t quite as easy as gathering a group of people and making sure they all have well-defined specific tasks.

The Remote Pairing Cheat Sheet

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the distributed model to the forefront, with remote work becoming the norm, even for teams that are usually co-located.

Leveling Up Your Organization With System Reviews

One of Etsy’s core engineering philosophies has been to push decisions to the edges wherever possible. Rather than making dictatorial style decisions we enable people to make their own choices given the feedback of a group.

Leadership & Self-management

A 4-Step Process For Avoiding Burnout

Managing the high pressure environment of a startup is challenging at the best of times, let alone over the past 3 months. When navigating through these grossly unpredictable times, you run the risk of overcorrecting. Working longer, expecting more, pushing harder.

A quick guide to becoming an agile boss

Many organizations struggle to reconcile with the fact that ‘going agile’ involves a radical re-thinking of leadership styles. Interestingly, the Agile Manifesto’s fifth principle says, ‘Build projects around motivated individuals.

This VP is Doing Things Differently in the Product Org — Here’s His Playbook

Late last year, Tyler Hogge fired off a series of tweets that caught our eye. In his thread, Hogge outlined how he’s “doing things a little differently” as VP of Product and Strategy at Divvy. The bedrock of his philosophy is that PMs are the GMs of their product.

Good Tech Lead, Bad Tech Lead

Good tech leads act as a member of the team, and consider themselves successful when the team is successful. They take their share of unsexy grungy work and clear roadblocks so their team can operate at 100%.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Agile Metrics — The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Suitable agile metrics reflect either a team’s progress in becoming agile or your organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization. At the team level, qualitative agile metrics typically work better than quantitative metrics.

Designing and evaluating metrics

Now more than ever, we need clear thinking about what measurements we should use to understand our world, our products, and ourselves. A metric is simultaneously 1) a designed artifact, 2) a lens through which we observe phenomena, and 3) way we set and monitor goals.

Managing feature toggles in teams

For its advocates, trunk-based development (TBD) is seen as preferable to feature branches because it makes Continuous Integration easier and reduces the chance of painful merge conflicts. Despite its advantages, TBD introduces its own challenges.

The supply chain of software

Thirty years ago, the number of software companies in the world was small—think Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle—and they wrote every piece of software that comprised their products. There was no supply chain for building software.

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy