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🤺 DevEx Course, Decision Making, Power vs Authority, Team Trust, Performance Management, Velocity, Change, Cognitive Load: TMW #360

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Thanks to Code Climate for sponsoring this issue of Tech Manager Weekly - empowering leaders at all levels with the critical context and visibility needed to improve everything from efficiency and on-time delivery to code quality and developer retention.

Hey there, welcome to the week

Campus members are in for a treat over the next couple of weeks: we have three new courses readying for launch!

First off the line, and live in Campus right now is Developer Experience for CTOs, led by Tobias Mende of Unblocked Engineering. In the course, Tobi digs into recent research and best practices to show us how to implement proven cultural and technical changes to improve productivity and happiness in your team. The course will enable you to:

  • Grasp the fundamentals of Developer Experience and its significance.
  • Learn about frameworks like SPACE and DORA to effectively measure DevEx and productivity.
  • Explore the concepts of flow, cognitive load, feedback, and strategies to optimise these areas.
  • Develop skills to design and conduct impactful engineering surveys, focusing on DevEx insights.
  • Identify common DevEx challenges and learn techniques for overcoming them.
  • Acquire knowledge of tools and methods for prioritising DevEx initiatives to ensure maximum return on investment.

The course is now available to all Campus Foundations, Masters and Circles members - take a look in the Courses page and you'll see how to access it.

If you're not a Campus member yet, you can join for £319 per year, down from £399 using the code LAUNCH23 until Jan 1st on the link below. See you there!

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

That's it! See you next week

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Events

CTO Craft Bytes: The challenge of visibility in complex organizations
In this fireside chat, find out how leaders at Fortune 500 companies are creating a cultural shift in their organizations
Eventbrite
CTO Craft Con: London | 8-9 May 2024
CTO Craft Con will bring together over 400 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, May 2024
CTO Craft Con London 2024
CTO Craft Mixer: Manchester
Network and learn with fellow senior tech leaders and CTO Craft members at The Old Monkey pub in Manchester.
Eventbrite

Reads of the Week

Empowerment vs Standardisation
Imagine the following scenario
Tech HumansDavid Lush
First decide how to decide: “one weird trick” for easier decisions - Jacob Kaplan-Moss
This is my preferred decision-making process – a version of the “document-discuss-decide” process that I called for at the end of the part 1 in this series. The most important part of this process – its “one weird trick”, if you will – is the way it includes a “how shall we decide?” step. This separates out the meta-question of the decision-making process from the decision itself, which (I’ve found) makes decisions much easier.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss

From our Sponsors

[From Code Climate] Thought Leadership: Lessons from the 2023 State of DevOps Report

The 2023 DevOps report highlights additional opportunities for enhancing engineering performance.

Learn More

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, HeadChannel, Google Cloud, Vention, Jellyfish, 101 Ways, Polly, Skiller Whale, Softwire, Sema, Uplevel, YLD

Leadership, Strategy & Business

People First Leadership – Working for Your Teams
As a leader, I feel honoured and privileged to be trusted to lead a team of humans. This is a complete career change for most who transition into a manager/people leadership role as your domain kno…
Simon PriorView all posts by siprior
The 3As Approach to Avoid Unnecessary Meetings
Let’s see how to clean up your calendar
The Tech CollectiveSéverin Bruhat
Power vs. Authority (And Why it Matters in The Workplace)
How do some people have much power in the workplace without an authority position? Or why some authorities don’t wield much power? In this post, we’ll go over the difference between power and authority and help you understand how to cultivate both without going overboard.
Science of PeopleMike Mantell
The 3 Layers to Team Trust
How is trust built in teams and organizations?
The Manager's GuideCsaba Okrona

Culture, People & Teams

Simple Performance Management Tracking Template
This is the bare bones of what it takes to keep track of performance on your team. I want to be abundantly clear, this is not a tool to hold over your team and review weekly. “Bella, you’re doing fantastic, look at all these +2s. Bill, oof, looots of -2s here.”
Hartley's HandbookJohn Hartley
8 Cultural Attributes of a Truly Agile Company
Gallup has discovered eight key drivers of agility -- dubbed the Agile8. Learn what they are and how to use them to unlock growth at your organization.
GallupMarco Nink
Forming. Storming. Norming. And the other one… the lesser known history of Tuckman’s team model
Forming. Storming. Norming. Performing. You may well have heard these stages of group maturity before, but do you know where the theory…
MediumMark Ridley
The Importance of Career Laddering | CSS-Tricks
The title of this article is misleading. It’s not actually very important for an Engineering Manager to use career laddering, per se, or my process. It is,
CSS-TricksSarah Drasner

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Practical Ways To Increase Product Velocity
A guide to speeding up your product and engineering teams
Stay SaaSyStay SaaSy
Writing and Improving Code with AI
AI for DevEx, Part 1
Nudge by unblocked.engineeringTobias Mende
Expand/Contract: making a breaking change without a big bang
The expand/contract pattern is the key to zero-downtime deployment, replacing nail-biting stop-the-world rollouts with a series of incremental changes that can be made at a leisurely pace.
Pete Hodgson
How to ship fast
My principles for shipping fast and protecting momentum developed over ~12 years of building software.
wrap text ↩Ben McRedmond

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Overcoming Your Need for Constant Validation at Work
Letting go of the need for constant approval at work doesn’t mean you have to stop caring. In fact, the most effective leaders are those who balance empathy and decisiveness, conviction and compassion, and warmth and strength. In this article, the author offers strategies for how to mitigate an excessive need for approval at work: 1) Do a gut check. The next time you’re faced with a choice, ask yourself: “Am I doing this because I believe it’s the right course of action, or because I want to be seen a certain way?” 2) Formulate your own opinions first. 3) Try the “so what?” test. 4) Wait 24 hours before responding to contentious or charged issues 5) Keep promises you make to yourself.
Harvard Business ReviewMelody Wilding
Why People Fail to Make Important Choices
Decision-making is a skill you can practice
No Small PlansCasey Rosengren
Cognitive Load for Knowledge Work
If you’re responsible for a budget that pays programmers or other knowledge workers, you probably care a great deal about getting good va…
Matt WynneMatt Wynne
How to tell if you actually have burnout, explained by a therapist
Burnout can cause problems in both your physical and mental health. A psychotherapist outlines the top tips to identify and deal with it.
BBC Science Focus MagazineAlex Hughes

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

Published by:

Andy Skipper