🛟 Performance Reviews, Strategy, Babble, Asking Questions, Toxic Positivity, Git Facts, Domain-Driven Cloud, F.A.I.L: TMW #354

Hello, hello, hello

It's getting close - we're only two weeks away from opening the doors at CTO Craft Con: Culture and the CTO. The speakers are prepped, the venue is ready to be prettified and the whole team is ready to welcome everyone who's coming to share the fun.

There's still time to grab your spot, but be quick, we're down to the last few tickets. Use the code "Community-Nov-23" to enable community pricing in the checkout - the link to purchase is just below. See you there 😃

Don't forget there's an early-bird discount for Campus memberships as well, which will be available until the beginning of November. We're adding new content continuously, and there'll be a new course, Managing Upwards and Sideways hitting the platform this week. To get the discount, use the code "LAUNCH-COMM", which will reduce the annual subscription to £319.

On with the show... See you next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Con: Culture and the CTO | London 7-8 November

CTO Craft Con will bring together over 250 Chief Technology Officers and other senior technology leaders from the most exciting start-ups, scale-ups, unicorns, and big tech companies to elevate their engineering culture in London, 7-8 November 2023.

CTO Craft Con November 2023

Conference Speaker Spotlight Q&A with Tom Hipwell, VP of Engineering at Hofy | CTO Craft

VP of Engineering at Hofy, Tom discusses how to manage company culture in tough times and how he creates a culture of innovation.

CTO CraftSarah Haselwood

Campus by CTO Craft: The Go-to Resource for Senior Technology Leaders

Created for CTOs, by CTOs: A transformative learning community for senior technology leaders in startups and scale-ups

CTO Craft Campus

CTO Craft Events

CTO Craft Bytes: Sorry - Sales is part of the CTO role

In this Bytes session, we will discuss strategies and best practices to understand your sales role as a CTO or technical leader.

Eventbrite

CTO Craft: Dublin Mixer

Network and learn with fellow CTOs, CTO Craft community members and aspiring tech leaders in Dublin, Ireland

Eventbrite

CTO Craft: Manchester Mixer

Network and learn with fellow CTO Craft members at The Old Monkey pub in Manchester.

Eventbrite

Reads of the Week

12 Ways to Rethink Your Next Performance Review Conversation

Stop dreading performance reviews. We assembled a list of 12 tips from expert leaders like Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham, Russ Laraway, Brie Wolfson, Julie Zhuo and more to make these conversations more impactful. There are frameworks and tactics for managers and reports alike to rethink their appro…

Solving the Engineering Strategy crisis.

These are speaking notes for my October 4th, QCon talk in San Francisco. Slides for this talk. Over the course of my career, I’ve frequently heard from colleagues, team members and random internet strangers with the same frustration: the company doesn’t have an Engineering strategy. I don’t think th…

Irrational Exuberance

From our Sponsors

[From Albany Growth] Average Product Salaries: PM to CPO

Want an updated snapshot of what product managers are paid? Check out Albany Growth's report on average pay based on over 100 datapoints.

Read the report

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, HeadChannel, Vention, Jellyfish, LinearB, 101 Ways, O’Reilly, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, Swarmia, Uplevel, YLD

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Babble hypothesis shows key factor to becoming a leader

Research shows that those who spend more time speaking tend to emerge as the leaders of groups, regardless of their intelligence.

Big ThinkPaul Ratner

Manage Your Capacity, Not Your Time - The Engineering Manager

We obsess over managing our time. However, we should focus on managing our capacity instead: it’s our ability to do our best work.

The Engineering ManagerJames Stanier

OKRs don’t solve dependencies, they reveal them

OKRs can work like an organisational flashlight, shedding light on the dependencies that keep teams from delivering autonomously

Jeff GothelfJeff Gothelf

5 Levels Of Problem Solving: A Framework For (First-Time) Managers -…

Breadcrumbs list

Corporate Rebels

Asking questions the right way

Engineers at all levels are encouraged to embrace curiosity, showcasing that asking questions, can pave the way for innovation and deeper understanding. Remember, the right question at the right time can be the catalyst for groundbreaking advancements in technology.

Vadim KravcenkoVadim Kravcenko

Culture, People & Teams

Is Your Team Overworking But Underperforming?

Hard work comes in two equally important forms: effort to perform and effort to improve. But too often, we only focus on the first part and become trapped in lengthy to-do lists. The author calls this the “performance zone.” When we switch our lens to include efforts to improve, entering what he cal…

Harvard Business ReviewEduardo Briceño

Toxic Positivity in the Workplace: Why & How to Deal with it

Toxic positivity hurts psychological safety at work. Learn the signs of a toxic positivity culture, and how to address it.

Lighthouse - Blog About Leadership & Management AdviceJason Evanish

Bounce Back - Strengthen your Teams to Weather Change

Forming, storming, norming, performing. Long lived teams are best. Keep your teams together. You’ll lose predictability if you change. Over the years I’ve heard all of this too. But the fact is, your teams will change. It’s in their nature. You might as well lean into that.

Heidi Helfand's NewsletterHeidi Helfand

Navigating Tech Teams: Motivation, Structure, and Domain Alignment

In my journey as a CTO, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing firsthand the transformative power of motivation and alignment within technology teams. I’ve seen teams that buzzed with energy…

MediumMatt Whetton

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Data engineering at Meta: High-Level Overview of the internal tech stack

This article provides an overview of the internal tech stack that we use on a daily basis as data engineers at Meta. The idea is to shed…

MediumAnalytics at Meta

Some miscellaneous git facts

Some miscellaneous git facts

Julia EvansJulia Evans

Domain-Driven Cloud: Aligning Your Cloud Architecture to Your Business Model

Domain-Driven Cloud (DDC) is an approach for creating your organization’s cloud architecture based on your business model. Based on Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and the architecture principle of high cohesion and low coupling, this article introduces DDC including the technical and human benefits of…

InfoQRyan Shriver

The State of Kubernetes: Self-Managed vs. Managed Platforms - DZone

Look at the current state of managed Kubernetes offerings as well as options for self-managed clusters. Discuss the pros and cons as well as recommendations.

DZoneYitaek Hwang

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Networking as an introvert CTO

There I was, standing in the middle of a buzzing tech event that our company organized, feeling like a fish out of water. The room was filled with

Vadim KravcenkoVadim Kravcenko

How Hard Should I Push Myself?

What the science of stress tells us about peak performance

Chain of ThoughtDan Shipper

Overcoming Developer Burnout: Strategies for Maintaining Motivation and Mental Health

Being a developer is a demanding job that requires a lot of focus and dedication. With the constant pressure to meet deadlines, solve…

MediumMS-HuecoDev

F.A.I.L.: lets talk about the F word

At this year’s Mind the Product conference I spoke about something that we don’t talk about enough: product failure. As product people we should accept failure and embrace the concept o…

As I learn ...

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