🍪 Interim CTOs, Engineering Meetings, Scaling, Resilience, Workplace Toxicity, Authenticity, Cycle Time: TMW #315

Hello, welcome to the week!

Some of our readers will remember our relaunch of the popular London Bytes series last September - and what a first event it was! Co-hosted with Albany Partners, the panel focused on the role of the Interim CTO, how to make the leap from permanent roles, how to find roles and build a personal brand, what the expectations of the role are, among many other topics. You can watch the panel replay here, featuring Meri Williams of Pleo, serial interim CTO Alfonso Ferrandez and David Mackey of Albany Partners' fractional and interim CTO department. Well worth a watch!

We have more London Bytes events lined up over the course of 2023, alongside our regular weekly online Bytes - more details about the next of those below.

Have a great week - see you soon!

Andy @ CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

Are Stay Interviews An Essential Part of Your Leadership Toolkit? | CTO Craft

Here’s why you should consider carrying out stay interviews and how they can form part of your overall employee engagement strategy.

CTO CraftSarah Haselwood

Meetings for an effective eng organization.

Some engineers develop a strong point of view that meetings are a waste of their time. There’s good reason for that perspective, as many meetings are quite bad, but it’s also a bit myopic: meetings can also be an exceptionally valuable part of a well-run organization. If you’re getting feedback that…

Irrational Exuberance

Scaling Your Team From 5 to 250 Engineers: A Complete Guide | Athenian

This is a complete guide to scaling your engineering org from 5 to 250 engineers. Learn the challenges you’ll face in velocity, quality, and outcome as you scale.

Our mission is to empower engineering teams to continuously improve.Eiso Kant

Upcoming CTO Craft Bytes

Why Closing the Digital Skills Gap Needs Flexible Learning

Alexia Pedersen, VP EMEA at O'Reilly joins CTO Craft Bytes for this fireside chat focusing on flexi learning. Friday Jan 27th, 12.30 GMT

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cto-craft-bytes-why-closing-the-digital-skills-gap-needs-flexible-learning-tickets-512988842437

From our Sponsors

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Thanks as always to all 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, Swarmia, YLD

Culture & People

Resilience and Waste in Software Teams

Resilience is coping with unexpected events and environmental change. To have resilience, you need slack. Slack in software development lets people do the little tasks that keep the work moving smo…

Jessitron

Workplace Toxicity Is Not Just a Mental Health Issue

Workplace toxicity leads to a host of negative mental and physical health outcomes, particularly for women of color.

MIT Sloan Management ReviewDeepa Purushothaman and Valerie Rein

Roles & Responsibilities — Just Work

Whenever something happens that’s not fair at work, you will play at least one of four different roles: person harmed, upstander, person who caused harm, or leader. You may at different moments play all the roles. And sometimes, confusingly, you may even find yourself in two or more roles at once.

Just WorkKim Scott

Evaluating Managers: 5 heuristics to measure managerial impact

Measuring a manager’s impact is hard since outcomes take time. The manager takes full responsibility for the team – be it stagnation, execution woes, poor collaboration, churn, or a lac…

CodeKraftAbdulFattaah Popoola

My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character

These methods have helped me enormously—and can save you much heartache and anxiety

The Honest BrokerTed Gioia

Leadership & Self Management

Bricks of Love: create purpose and engagement with weekly updates

In his book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” Daniel Pink talks about “motivation 3.0″, which comes after basic needs are covered (“motivation 1.0”) and carrots and sticks (“motivation 2.0″). There are three main components in Pink’s theory: • Autonomy to be in control of our de…

Designing A Bug-Free Operating System for Great Managers

Managing is a big role, and effective managers are more critical now than ever. Use the Manager’s Operating System as your checklist.

Management Excellence by Art PettyArt Petty

Shaping Your Authenticity

There are many genres of leadership theories. One of those is authentic leadership. Regardless of how leadership psychology researchers define it, the most common view of authentic leadership is leading while being true to oneself and acting according to one’s feelings, emotions, and values. Unfortu…

because writing is clarifying

Leading With Influence: The Art Of Changing Your Organization — Startup Patterns

It is important to realize that you can only ever influence people to change. You cannot force them, no matter how much authority you may technically have over them. Changing an organization is much more about changing the mindsets and attitudes of the people in it than changing rules or procedures.

Startup PatternsSam McAfee

What does it mean to be a cost center?

When I shared my piece on Measuring an engineering organization, one point I made was that focusing too heavily on optimization metrics (e.g. things like CI/CD time) can turn engineering into a cost center. That’s not because optimization metrics aren’t important, they’re extremely important! Rather…

Irrational Exuberance

Agile & Engineering

We invested 10% to pay back tech debt; Here’s what happened

Why and how we continuously invested the team bandwidth to pay back tech debt and what were the results?

Alex Ewerlöf NotesAlex Ewerlöf

Top 5 Considerations for Better Security in Your CI/CD Pipeline

These factors can help DevOps teams make sure their container strategy isn’t jeopardizing security.

The New StackAli Bidabadi

Cycle Time

An examination of the way organizational structure and process affects the rate at which you iterate

[email protected] (Andrew Bosworth)webmasterboz.com (Andrew Bosworth)

Why Your Code Sucks: Common Excuses for Bad Programming

Dave Farley’s exploration of seven common excuses that software developers make for doing a terrible job.

The New StackDavid Cassel

Why you can’t buy an observability solution off the shelf

An effective observability solution is one that helps an operator quickly answer the question “Why is my system behaving this way?” This is a difficult problem to solve in the general c…

Surfing ComplexityLorin Hochstein

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

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Have an amazing week!

Andy