🍭 Campus Launch! WIP and Brooks, Post-GenAI, Confidence, Energising Teams, Greenfield Systems, Story Points, Complexity Genius: TMW #352

Hello, hello, hello!

The time has finally arrived: on Tuesday this week, we'll be formally opening the doors on CTO Craft Campus, the new learning-focused community platform for senior technology leaders.

We've spent the last 12 months pulling together a vast amount of content and videos and spliced them into some ground-breaking self-paced learning modules. We've tagged everything to make it easy to see what to consume to fill out any gaps, or even refresh skills you already have with the latest thinking. Alongside the courses, we've added functionality to help you assess your confidence in all important parts of the CTO role, and build a learning pathway that you can consume at your own pace. This we're calling Campus Foundations.

Coming down the line in a couple of months is Masters, the next stage of Campus: more in-depth co-learning experiences, with a mixture of self-paced courses, live online workshops and exclusive events with industry experts. What's more, you'll receive accreditation from leading leadership and management education bodies for taking part.

Campus covers everything from leadership and strategy, to team management and hiring, through building and running modern technology stacks all the way to dealing with stress and personal growth as a leader. We can't wait to welcome the first learners later this week - come and have a look, and keep your eye on Slack for more information on Tuesday!

On with the links - see you next week...

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Con Speaker Spotlights

Conference Speaker Spotlight Q&A with James Stanier, Director of Engineering at Shopify | CTO Craft

James discusses the importance of succession planning, what to ask in your first one-to-one and how to create a psychologically safe culture.

CTO CraftSarah Haselwood

Conference Speaker Spotlight Q&A with Rija Javed, Engineering Leader at Facebook | CTO Craft

Rija gives us her views on aligning values within an organisation and team, how to communicate values and build values into your culture.

CTO CraftSarah Haselwood

CTO Craft Bytes

CTO Craft Bytes: The Post GenAI Age

This CTO Craft Bytes explores the long-term impact of AI on software teams

Eventbrite

CTO Craft Bytes - ICYMI

The Cost Associated with Making the Wrong Hire

Register now for The Cost Associated with Making the Wrong Hire on crowdcast, scheduled to go live on October 6, 2023, 12:30 PM GMT+1.

crowdcastCTO Craft

Reads of the Week

How WIP Insights Allow Us to Revisit Brooks’ Law About Adding People to a Team - Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant

Several people on LinkedIn commented on my post, Want Better and Faster Results? Increase Team Size and Reduce WIP. They wondered if adding more people to a small team would violate Brooks’ Law. As with all good questions, the answer is “It depends.” It depends on how your lifecycle manages feedback…

Johanna Rothman, Management ConsultantJohanna

From our Sponsors

[From Code Climate] Gaining Visibility and Predictability in Engineering

Code Climate surveyed 200+ engineering leaders on what areas they're most interested in gaining visibility into.

Read the Report Here

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, Cohaesus, Google Cloud, Vention, Jellyfish, LinearB, 101 Ways, O’Reilly, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, Swarmia, Uplevel, YLD

Leadership, Strategy & Business

5 Ways to Improve your Tech Lead Confidence | CTO Notes | Lorgio Trinidad | Technical Leadership

Discover the most common situations that Tech Leads face and strategies to boost your career.

Technical Leadership

Seniority and self-management: you don’t have to do this alone - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

At a certain level of seniority – typically the Staff level for ICs, and the Director level for managers – you’ll be expected to fully own huge areas of responsibility without detailed guidance. The mistake that many people make when they’re new to this level of autonomy is believing they have to do…

Jacob Kaplan-Moss

5 Proven Methods to Add Energy to Others - Leadership Freak

Everything that’s done requires energy. Lousy leaders suck the life out of people. Remarkable leaders add energy. Here’s how…

Leadership FreakDan Rockwell

Impostor Syndrome or Peter Principle…

… Learn how you can tell the difference and what to do about it.

Management MattersRay Carnes

Culture, People & Teams

TBM 246: Why Didn’t They Say No?

I was working with a leader recently, and they asked me why a team might knowingly commit to work they couldn’t feasibly get done. Why didn’t they say no? I penned this little list (not specific to my workplace, but drawing from years of these conversations).

The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler

20 habits of high-performing leadership teams

Here are 14 signs that your leadership team might not actually be a well-functioning team:

MediumJurriaan Kamer

(People on) Nice Teams Finish Last

Give clear feedback!

Stay SaaSyStay SaaSy

How to empower your team through autonomy, mastery and purpose

Ways to empower engineering teams as engineering lead

Effective Software LeadsJames Samuel

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Estimating how much it costs to run greenfield systems

It is all too tempting to overlook cloud compute costs when planning a software system. Focus tends to be on cost to build. But for some systems the cost to run can greatly exceed the cost to build. This article explains how to break your system down into component parts and estimate your cloud comp…

ThoughtworksRyan Dawson

How to Mix Junior and Senior Engineers on a Team

One of the most important parts of the job of an engineering leader is assembling a team of developers that can work together in the most…

Management MattersJakub Svoboda

Everything You Need to Know About Story Points in Jira - DZone

What are story points? How does one estimate a story with points? How much time do story points take? Learn the answers to these and more questions.

DZoneOleksandr Siryi

TBM 245: The Magic Prioritization Trick

Here is a fun prioritization exercise. Some have described it as a Jedi mind trick. It is very simple but it plays with people’s head in a good way. It draws heavily from Joshua Arnold’s work on cost of delay, particularly this article on qualitative cost of delay

The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Keep Calm and Be Assertive

Deal with situations with less stress and more understanding.

Management MattersIvona Hirschi

The High Price of Being a Workaholic and Why You Need To Slow Down

How overworking can lead to burnout, poor health, and relationship problems.

The Tech CollectiveSéverin Bruhat

One minute for mental health | Thoughtworks

ThoughtworksKaty White

Jennifer Garvey Berger - Complexity Genius summary - Crisp’s Blog

Jennifer Garvey Bergers master class on Complexity Genius at the Leading Complexity Program 2023

Crisp's BlogLeading Complexity

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

Please do remember to share this link if you know of anyone who’d like to receive TMW:

https://techmanagerweekly.com

Have an amazing week!

Andy