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🍔 Capability Frameworks, RACI, Assessing Managers, Onboarding, RTO, Deployments, Being Right: TMW #323

Hey hey! Welcome to the week

Ahead of CTO Craft Con London in May, we'll be posting deep-dive interviews with some of the speakers in the amazing line up. This week, we chatted with David Santoro, CTO of online car marketplace carwow to learn how he approaches long-term planning and staying ahead of the game. Take a look, the link's below.

This Thursday, we'll be back in London for our Town Hall event, at the Wapping Tavern in East London - it's free to come along, but get in quick, as tickets are limited. There's no fixed agenda, just networking, chat and drinks, and we'd love to see you there if you're available.

On with the links - until next time!

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Con: The Strategic CTO | London 23-24 May
CTO Craft Con will bring together over 200 Chief Technology Officers and other senior technology leaders from the most exciting start-ups, scale-ups, unicorns, and big tech companies to elevate their tech strategy in London, 23-24 May 2023.
CTO Craft Con London 2023
Spotlight Q&A with Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, carwow, David Santoro | CTO Craft
David Santoro, Co-Founder/CTO, carwow, and long-time coding fan, discusses team strategy and balancing business objectives and stakeholder needs.
CTO CraftAndy Skipper

CTO Craft Bytes

CTO Craft Bytes - Town Hall
Come and meet fellow members of the CTO Craft community for this in-person get together in London.
Eventbrite

Read of the Week

From good to great: A capability framework for building exceptional product engineering teams
Applying an engineering level concepts to teams to improve collaboration, growth, and level set expectations.
Juan’s And ZeroesJuan Pablo Buriticá

From our Sponsors

HELM - Your leadership pipeline

We train engineering managers at startups and scaleups to be mini CTOs. Enrol your current and future engineering leaders now for our next cohort.

Enrol your team

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, Uplevel, YLD

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content meant for other roles
Learning about roles you work with can provide a meaningful competitive advantage in the modern tech world
Matthew’s SubstackMatthew Grohman
The First 30 Days as a CTO or VP of Engineering for SaaS: What You Need to Know
Jump into a brand new team or company as the CTO or VP of engineering and avoid missteps and make sure you acquire the information you need to get started quickly.
The First 30 Days as a CTO or VP of Engineering for SaaS: What You Need to Know
TBM 206: When is RACI the Right Tool?
RACI might be a good tool if you are experiencing one or more of the following dynamics and you lack the time (or support) to address these issues in other ways: People working in a workgroup, not a team People working together on a temporary/ad-hoc basis
The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler
Assess your manager’s work, engineering leader
Make sure your manager is a great role model to follow
Practical Engineering ManagementMirek Stanek

Culture, People & Teams

Running your engineering onboarding program.
Most companies say that it takes three to six months for newly hired engineers to fully ramp up. Engineering leaders know it’s impolitic to admit that it takes their team longer than three to six months to onboard new engineers, so that’s what they say out loud, but they generally believe it takes l…
Irrational Exuberance
6 Questions to Ask Yourself When You’re Frustrated with Your Team
Today’s managers are under a lot of pressure. When it’s a constant strain to get work done, it’s easy to have a short fuse. When expectations aren’t met, the brain short-circuits to judgment and reaction. This is exactly the opposite of what your employees need. In healthy workplace cultures, leader…
Harvard Business ReviewAmii Barnard-Bahn
HH 003 - Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning
“Quotability may be the key to success,” is what Bruce Tuckman said about the Stages of Group Development “Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing” in his 1965 paper “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups.” The first four stages, Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, arose as Tuckman synthesized f…
Heidi Helfand's NewsletterHeidi Helfand
Amazon doubling down on RTO (return to office)
The tech giant is not blinking: after the unprecedented pushback on its 3-day return to office policy last month, Amazon just made it clear that the policy is going ahead.
The Pragmatic EngineerGergely Orosz

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Story Points: The Complete Guide & FAQ | Parabol
Unlock the power of story points in your agile team. Learn how to confidently estimate and prioritize with this complete guide and FAQ.
ParabolAviva
ChatGPT & the Future of Technical Assessments | Codility
Codility offers the strongest and only ChatGPT-resistant technical assessment solution in the market - here’s why.
CodilityVienna Urias
Deployments not Releases
Turn releases into something for Marketing, not Engineering
Get Good at Delivering Software™️Dave Mangot
Deploys Are the ✨WRONG✨ Way to Change User Experience
In this post, Charity talks about the differences between deploys and releases, and why deploys are a terrible way to make UX changes.
HoneycombCharity Majors

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

4 Cognitive Biases That Impacts Productivity - TechTello
The human brain has this remarkable cognitive capacity to perform at levels far beyond what we consider as our natural abilities, but it’s not without its limits. The cognitive biases that enable the brain to prioritize and process large amounts of information quickly also gets in the way of our pro…
TechTelloVinita Bansal
How to Measure All Your Work in Progress to Make Better Decisions - Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
At a recent client, a senior leader, Tim, said, “We realize we can’t do everything, but we don’t know how to get a handle on what we need to do.” We talked about what they measured and how long it took them to make decisions. (See Why Minimize Management Decision Time.) Tim explained that they … How…
Johanna Rothman, Management Consultantjohanna
The ‘great resignation’ didn’t happen in Australia, but the ‘great burnout’ did
Workers in Australia didn’t resign from their jobs in the wake of COVID, but they did burn out. A new survey found some solutions.
The ConversationBrendan Churchill
Being Right Doesn’t Matter
I started Letting Go by mentioning it was the story of how I learned one of the three most important leadership lessons I ever learned. It…
MediumRoy Rapoport

That’s it!

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https://ctocraft.com/community

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Have an amazing week!

Andy

Published by:

Andy Skipper