🌮 Building Relationships, Succession Planning, Peer Groups, Agilesplaining, Story Mapping, Domain Expertise: TMW #390

Hello again, welcome to the week!

Over 150 Campus members have already joined our brand new course with Carol Palombini on Emotional Intelligence for CTOs, and the feedback is rolling in - members are particularly enjoying the practical nature of the course, with some real, actionable tips to improve work relationships, communication skills, self-awareness and much more. The course is free to all Foundations and Circles members, so jump in and take a look.

During CTO Craft Con: London 2024, we hosted a series of roundtable discussions, and they were extremely popular, to say the least!

If you're in the UK in November, don't miss CTO Craft: Conversations, a half-day event brimming with exclusive, topic-based discussions designed to ignite learning and forge valuable connections. Share war stories, best practices, and hard-won lessons with fellow leaders in an intimate setting. This is your chance to connect with peers who understand your challenges, all within a safe and private environment. Seats are limited, so pre-register now to secure your spot at this exclusive event and be the first in line for tickets (releasing very, very soon)!

CTO Craft: Conversations | CTO Craft

Welcome to the launch of our newest event: CTO Craft: Conversations! Join us for a half-day of engaging discussions and networking opportunities designed specifically for CTOs and engineering leaders. Pick from nine dynamic sessions led by industry experts and facilitators who will delve into critical topics such as: Measuring developer productivity and performance Building an aligned, engaged & resilient culture Riding the GenAI waveObservability 2.0: How we build better software Leading the charge: What happens when things go wrong These intimate roundtable discussions offer the perfect setting to share reflections, stories, experiences, lessons, and best practices with fellow leaders in similar positions. Don’t miss out on this exclusive opportunity! Due to the nature of the event, tickets are extremely limited. Secure your priority access now by pre-registering your interest today. Date: Wednesday 6th November Time: 12:00 – 18:00 Location: London Agenda: 12:00 – Registration & Lunch 13:00-18:00 – Roundtable Discussions 18:00 – Drinks Reception Register Your Interest

CTO Craft

OK, on with the links - see you next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

Two fundamental cloud practices every technical leader should implement | CTO Craft

DoiT’s Matan Bordo walks us through the importance of regular architecture reviews and business alignment

CTO CraftMatan Bordo

CTO Craft Events

CTO Craft Con: Berlin | 24th - 25th September 2024

CTO Craft Con will bring together 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.

CTO Craft Con: Berlin 2024

Check out all of our upcoming Mixer events - is there one happening in your city?

Reads of the Week

How to build a strategy

Strategies are pretty tough to design and build - and often even harder to bring to life. In this article I share some guiding principles.

Cultivated ManagementRob Lambert

TBM 301: How to Reconcile Prioritization and $/Time Allocation

Over the years I have been seduced by using allocation %s as a primary way to describe strategy deployment. I was wrong. My thinking has changed. A Seductive Model Many companies express their strategies (or plans) using % allocations to different investment buckets. For example:

The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler

GenAI Survey

The CTO Craft Generative AI survey - How are your teams using it?

As GenAI continues to be a hot topic, we designed this brief survey to help you navigate through the buzz and provide valuable insights to guide you in the right direction. By participating anonymously, you can benchmark your AI practices, gain insights into industry trends, and share your expertise with the community.

Plus, you'll receive a detailed report after the survey and have a chance to win a £50 Amazon voucher.

Take the Survey

About our Sponsors

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

If you're interested in sponsoring TMW or any of our events, drop us a line at partners@ctocraft.com.

Leadership, Strategy & Business

How to build good relationships inside and outside your engineering team

Building good relationships with your colleagues will make your work experience SO much better!

Engineering LeadershipGregor Ojstersek

Plan Your Succession Today

Learn why It’s in every manager’s responsibility and interest to plan for their succession.

Sudo Make Me a CTOSergio Visinoni

Management Leverages - Controlling The System - Yaniv Preiss

Management Leverages - how to shape the system

Yaniv PreissYaniv Preiss

Developing domain expertise: get your hands dirty.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about developing domain expertise, and wanted to collect my thoughts here. Although I covered some parts of this in Your first 90 days as CTO (understanding product analytics, shadowing customer support, talking to customers, and talking with your internal experts), I missed the most important dimension of effective learning: getting your hands dirty. At Carta, I’m increasingly spending time focused on our fund financials business, which requires a deep understanding of accounting.

Irrational Exuberance

Culture, People & Teams

Peer Groups

Who needs friends anyway?

Fish Food for ThoughtMike Fisher

The Looking Glass: Culture Changers

More like a forest, less like a Stonehenge. A deep dive into what culture really is, and how you can go about evolving it.

The Looking GlassJulie Zhuo

Why Do Developers Lose 1 Day a Week to Inefficiencies?

Managers have no clue what developers need to be productive and happy, according to a new study from Atlassian and DX.

The New StackJennifer Riggins

Dinosaurs!

A social cue for slaying ambiguity

Garry Shutler

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Agilesplaining: Why the C-level Doesn’t Get Agile

Stop Agilesplaining the Agile Manifesto

Maarten’s NewsletterMaarten Dalmijn

How to Create a Story Map When Writing User Stories

Story maps help to create a shared understanding of the product, visualize user needs, and elicit user story ideas. Discover how to create your own.

Mountain Goat SoftwareMike Cohn

New Atlassian research on developer experience highlights a major disconnect between developers and leaders - Work Life by Atlassian

We surveyed 2,100 devs and managers about developer experience. Our report shares what causes misalignments and how to make improvements in your organization.

Work Life by AtlassianAndrew Boyagi

Why your Agile team needs visual collaboration (and what to look for) | Agile Alliance

Learn what visual collaboration means, why it is essential for supporting Agile teams, and what qualities to seek out as you search for the right visual collaboration solution.

Agile Alliance |Lucid Software

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Fighting With Your Boss

Fights between a manager and report can be some of the most stressful experiences in life.

Stay SaaSy

How to harness the power of professional development goals - Work Life by Atlassian

Feeling stuck? Professional development goals might be the remedy you need.

Work Life by AtlassianKat Boogaard

From Why to Why Not : Tactical Approach to Conflict Management

Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash

Management MattersAkanksha Gopinath

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