🔬 Premortems, DevEx, Tough Feedback, Context, Purpose, Building S3, Ideal PRs, Performance Anxiety: TMW #342

Hello again, welcome to the week!

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Andy @ CTO Craft

Supercharge your project success: the power of premortems | CTO Craft

Do you know the differences between project pre and post-mortems? We discuss what premortems are and tips for carrying them out.

CTO CraftSarah Haselwood

CTO Craft Bytes - ICYMI

CTO Craft Bytes: Embedding developer experience into your organisation

Register now for CTO Craft Bytes: Embedding developer experience into your organisation on crowdcast, scheduled to go live on July 28, 2023, 12:30 PM GMT+1.

crowdcastCTO Craft

Reads of the Week

Making the bug fixes count. Or how to fix promotions in tech companies

Yesterday, I came across yet another article explaining how promotions work at big tech. At this point, it’s no surprise to anyone that individual contributors and the management team prefer to work on “impactful” projects rather than polish a specific product, even if that’s what their users are as…

Attention is All A Manager Needs

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Leadership, Strategy & Business

How to Scale Yourself Down — Not Up — as a Leader

After a four-decade career of toggling back and forth between big and small, Lightspark SVP of Engineering James Everingham shares his playbook for scaling down your leadership as you go from an org of hundreds or thousands to a handful of direct reports.

First Round Review

Suzi McAlpine | The Art of Leadership | An open letter to leadership teams

I want to start this open letter by saying I see the pressure you’re under right now.

Suzi McAlpine | The Art of LeadershipSuzi McAlpine

Overcoming Your Fear of Giving Tough Feedback

A lack of constructive feedback is detrimental to your team, depriving them of mentorship and growth opportunities. And workplaces marked by poor communication and unclear expectations are breeding grounds for low trust and disengagement. Giving feedback is essential to being an effective leader. In…

Harvard Business ReviewMelody Wilding

The Next Larger Context

Technology, startups, programming, technical management and software architecture

Camille Fournier

Culture, People & Teams

Building teams with a purpose in mind

Every team is different. It’s important to build a team with people that resonate with the purpose.

Engineering LeadershipGregor Ojstersek

3 Characteristics That Could Be Preventing Your Good Team from Becoming Great

You’ve got a good team, but you have a sense they could be better. These three characteristics might be hurting your future success.

Let's Grow LeadersKarin Hurt

Creating Shared Identity On A Team | David Burkus

In this article, we will explore four key actions that leaders can take toward creating shared identity on a team.

David BurkusDavid Burkus

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3

Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.

All Things DistributedWerner Vogels

The ideal PR is 50 lines long | Graphite

Graphite is modern code review for fast-moving teams - we help engineers write and review smaller pull requests, stay unblocked, and ship faster.

GraphiteWritten by Greg Foster

The Evolution of Cloud Infra and Platform Engineering Orgs

Modern backend systems have reached a level of complexity that organizations struggle to wield. Many find themselves in a constant cycle of hiring, reorganization and reprioritization in order to better align themselves with that complexity.Simplicity won’t be found at the end of the infrastructure-…

KlothoAla Shiban

How to Measure and Prevent Defect Escapes in Any Project - Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant

How do you know when you finished a feature? You might have a checklist, to make sure multiple people looked at all the artifacts, and that everything is checked in. (This is easier if you work as a mob/ensemble, pair, or swarm.) In addition, a product leader might approve the feature. Finally, the…

Johanna Rothman, Management Consultantjohanna

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Hanlon’s Razor: Not Everyone is Out to Get You

Hanlon’s Razor teaches us not to assume the worst intention in the actions of others. Understanding Hanlon’s Razor helps us see the world in a more positive light, stop negative assumptions, and improve relationships.

Farnam StreetFarnam Street

How to embrace performance anxiety

Or why being calm and composed is not always a desirable state of mind.

Set Yourself Up For FailureGeorge Sudarkoff

Sweat Some of the Small Stuff

Of the three hard problems in computer science, the one I probably spend the most time on is “naming things”. (Off-by-one errors are too often the bane of my programming existence thoug…

Gabriel JivaGabriel

Passion Can Burn Us Out At Work | The Horizons Tracker

A lot of jobs now specifically ask applicants to be passionate about what they do. The logic is that this passion will drive candidates to herculean feats and ensure that we truly enjoy what it is that we do. Research from Florida State University reminds us, however, that passion can also be a path…

The Horizons TrackerAdi

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy