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🏋 Spontaneously Combustible People, Design Thinking, Influence, Delegating, Tech Debt, Documentation: TMW #385

Crumbs, it's a packed issue... Also - are you joining a Mixer this week?
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Thanks to Sema for sponsoring this issue of Tech Manager Weekly - measure how much GenAI you have in your code today!

Hello there! It's Monday

Tickets to our first conference in Berlin in September have been flying out, and we've now sold all of the available Super Early Bird tickets. There's still time to join the party - just remember to use the community discount code: Community-Berlin-24

Have you come to any of our Mixer events yet? It's the best way to network with other technology leaders in your area over a beverage and a snack, compare notes and get advice on strategies and approaches. We have three over the course of this week, in Gothenburg, Toronto and Dublin, and coming up in July we'll be in Boston, Amsterdam and Manchester. Have a look at the Mixers page for info on all upcoming networking events.

Coming shortly on Campus we have new courses on Emotional Intelligence for CTOs, a mini course on Decision Making, new videos and worksheets and a whole lot more - now's the perfect time to dig in and take a look.

That's it - see you next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

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

CTO Craft Con: Berlin | 24th - 25th September 2024
CTO Craft Con will bring together hundreds of 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 Berlin, Sep 2024
CTO Craft Con: Berlin 2024
CTO Craft Mixer: Dublin 2024
Join our community of CTOs and senior tech leaders for an informal meet-up in Dublin
EventsRachel Thomas
CTO Craft Mixer: Gothenburg 2024
Join our community of CTOs and senior tech leaders for an informal meet-up in Gothenburg
EventsRachel Thomas
CTO Craft Mixer: Toronto
Join our community of CTOs and senior tech leaders for an informal meet-up in Toronto.
EventsBrooke Stead

Reads of the Week

Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You - Stack Overflow
Stack OverflowCharity Majors
Design Thinking Explained | Management 3.0
What is Design Thinking and how does it work? The Design Thinking Process explained. Plus Management 3.0 practices can enhance the process.
Management 3.0nadine

Managing the risks and capturing the benefits from using GenAI coding tools in the SDLC

Understanding the amount of GenAI code in the codebase mitigates risks and supports appropriate adoption. You can try out Sema’s AI Code Monitor for free here. CTO Craft members get a discount on their first three months, post-pilot.

Get Your Exclusive Discount

A huge thanks to all our sponsors and partners, who make Tech Manager Weekly and the CTO Craft community possible:

AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Coherence, HeadChannel, Google Cloud, Jellyfish, Polly, Skiller Whale, Softwire, Sema, Unblocked, Uplevel, Vention, YLD, 101 Ways

Leadership, Strategy & Business

How to Influence Without Authority with Irina Stanescu (Eng Leader & Coach; ex-Google, ex-Uber)
Chat with Irina Stanescu (Founder, The Caring Techie)
Level Up by Ethan EvansEthan Evans
This Is How To Be A Great Manager: 4 Powerful Secrets From Research - Barking Up The Wrong Tree
Gallup did the most extensive study of what makes a successful manager. And what they learned will definitely surprise you…
Barking Up The Wrong TreeEric Barker
You need to understand the business to design a good engineering strategy
Engineering Strategy driven by Business
Learnings on Engineering StrategyAleix Morgadas
Learning to Delegate as a First-Time Manager
Learning how to delegate well is a skill every first-time manager needs to learn from the very start. Many people are promoted into management for doing their previous job well. But once you’re promoted into a leadership role, you must accept that you can’t do everything on your own — nor should you. Though it may seem counterintuitive, the more senior you become in an organization, the less you’ll be involved in doing the day-to-day work. You’ll need to have a sense of what’s happening without directly contributing to every project. To do that, you first have to change your mindset from “doing” to “managing,” even though it might feel uncomfortable. If you resist this change, you’ll likely end up overwhelmed and (unintentionally) holding onto opportunities that could be given to your team.
Harvard Business ReviewShanna Hocking

Culture, People & Teams

Why You Should Only Recruit Spontaneously Combustible People - Blog
The late Kazuo Inamori , the charismatic founder of two major Japanese companies, Kyocera and KDDI, won worldwide fame for his unorthodox management…
Corporate Rebels
A framework for thinking about team memory, joining up and serendipity in hybrid organisations
Last week, I gave a keynote talk at Agile Manchester, based on a previous blog post. The talk was more detailed and had a new framing; this post summarises what I shared.
Emily WebberEmily Webber
In-person meetings are more inclusive, and I’ve got the receipts
Don’t Try To Step-Function Everyone All At Once
Don’t be a jack of all growth plans, master of none.
Stay SaaSyStay SaaSy

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Business Blind Spots: How product pressure breeds Technical Debt and how to deal with it
Technical debt is the worst name for something the whole company is responsible for and is mainly caused by non-technical people in the…
Level Up CodingAndrew Winnicki
The Documentation Tradeoff
A little, sure, but be careful about more
Software Design: Tidy First?Kent Beck
Great software teams don’t release in phases
The dangers of ’Phase 1’s, MVPs and PoCs
Leading DevelopersAnton Zaides
The Meta-Retrospective - DZone
The Meta-Retrospective fosters collaboration and creates a shared understanding of the big picture between teams and stakeholders.
DZoneStefan Wolpers

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Trust, Care, and Love — Gosei
Facilitating the five group dynamic patterns will gradually develop a culture of Trust, Care, and Love for the shared mental and physical space.
GoseiAri Tikka
Cultivating the Self-Confidence to Take Chances on You
Part of deciding to lead is determining whether you care enough to want to create, build, or fix more than you fear criticism or failure.
Management Excellence by Art PettyArt Petty
How to be Direct Without Being Rude - TechTello
When trying to be direct do you often come across as too strong? Are you being called pushy, rude, insensitive or assigned other such labels? You may like to say things as they are because beating around the bush is not your style. But an honest and direct communication that lacks compassion can leave others feeling hurt, angry and annoyed. There’s a fine line between being direct and being inconsiderate. Stepping over the line from directness to rudeness is easy if you don’t pay attention to your communication style.
TechTelloVinita Bansal
Sadness: Battling Leadership’s Dark Secret - Leadership Freak
Sadness is leadership’s dark secret. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill experienced bouts of darkness. It wouldn’t surprise me if you felt it. I’m not talking about depression. I’m talking about the weight of caring more than others. Here are 10 ways to get a grip on sadness.
Leadership FreakDan Rockwell

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy

Published by:

Andy Skipper