🍌 Effective 1:1s, Leadership Influence, Mind Melds, Underperformance, Capacity Planning, Wicked Features, Abandoning Scrum: TMW #430
Super bumper packed Bank Holiday issue...
đź§
Interested in joining a Mentoring Circle? We're enrolling now - more details below...
Hey there, welcome to the week!
It's a Bank Holiday today in the United Kingdom, so we have a bumper extended selection of links for you below - let's dive straight in...
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Events
Here are all the upcoming CTO Craft Con events, along with your exclusive access code for discounted subscriber tickets - see you soon
- CTO Craft Con: Toronto - Access Code: Community-Toronto-25
- CTO Craft Con: Berlin - Access code: Community-Berlin-25
- CTO Craft Con: The Finance Edition - Pre-registration now open
- CTO Craft Con: London 2026 - Pre-registration now open
CTO Craft Bytes: Tech on the Radar - Balancing Big Bets with Small Wins | CTO Craft
CTO Craft Bytes returns to London with an evening focused on smart decision-making in a noisy tech landscape. Whether you’re setting a strategy or avoiding the latest hype cycle, this session is designed to help you focus on what truly moves the needle.
CTO Craft Mixer: Belfast
Join our community of CTOs and senior tech leaders for our first relaxed meet-up in Belfast!
CTO Craft Mixer: Munich | CTO Craft
Connect with our community of CTOs and senior tech leaders in Munich, share insights, and discuss key tech trends and challenges.
Want to meet other TMW subscribers and CTO Craft Community members in your city? See all upcoming Mixers in cities around the world here.
Reads of the Week
Mastering the Human Side of Engineering: Lessons from Apple, Palantir and Slack
Apple engineering leader Michael Lopp gives tactical advice for managers on how to empower individual engineers — and become better leaders themselves.
First Round Staff
Embedding a Great Engineering Culture
How to Build a Great Engineering Culture: Article 3
Mark Grebler
Playbook for Effective 1:1s
A concrete plan for effective meetings without the management theater
Josh
CTO Craft Mentoring Circles
Time to Ditch the Solo Act? Join a private, curated CTO peer group
Mentoring Circles provide you with a Community of Practice for engineering leadership, with monthly peer-led discussions about real-world challenges, sharing insights and fuelling each other's growth as leaders of technology teams, facilitated by an experienced CTO Coach.
We're now enrolling for the next Circle - don't miss out!
If you're interested in sponsoring TMW or any of our events, drop us a line at partners@ctocraft.com.
Leadership, Strategy & Business
Building Leadership Influence By Asking The Right Questions First
Learn how to increase your leadership influence by focusing on the critical questions that matter to different stakeholders. Discover how to tailor your communication approach to executives, peers, and team members by first understanding what information is most valuable to them.
What Managing Up Really Means: A Practical Guide Working with Your Manager — Humans in Systems
Managing up might sound like corporate jargon, something only senior folks or managers in big companies worry about. But in reality, it’s something most of us do, consciously or not, as part of everyday work. In this post, I share practical tips and real examples for building trust, getting support
Busra Koken
A weekly mind meld
Writing to your team every week is a great way of building trust, calling out what’s importantly, and letting people get to know you better.
James Stanier
Being the Leader Your Team Actually Wants to Follow
Leadership isn’t about having all the answers — it’s about showing up real. These 10 traits have helped me lead better (and mess up less). No fluff. Just what actually works.
Tobias Mende
The hidden influences shaping your leadership style
The Leadership Root from “Care to Dare” helps you identify unconscious influences and transform them into practices that align with your values and goals.
Esko Lehtme
Culture, People & Teams
Do not start by changing the culture to drive the improvements, follow it first
Start with small processes that eventually leads to cultural change
Aleix Morgadas
Manage Underperformance - Be Effective in 9 Steps - Yaniv Preiss
Proactively handle underperformance, it’s your obligation
Yaniv Preiss
If Culture Is “Just How We Do Things Around Here,” Then Who’s Doing the Designing? - Coqual
Most cultures aren’t broken—they’re just accidental. Here’s how leaders can design culture that drives inclusion, retention, and results.
jglazer
Capacity Planning to Unlock Successful Planning
Predicting what a group of engineering teams can realistically achieve every quarter or in any specific timeframe is not a straightforward task.
Sebastiano Armeli
How to combat bias in the hiring process
Don’t let bias dictate your next hire and make hiring decisions based on skills, not gut feelings
Maxim Schepelin
Technology, Operations & Delivery
Wicked features
Why is working at large tech companies so hard? It’s because a small subset of “wicked features” dominate everything else. If you’re building a todo app, adding…
Checklist to Safely Abandon Scrum
Here’s what you should address
Willem-Jan Ageling
Elevate Your Engineering Culture: The Power of Documenting Architecture Decisions
Learn why clear, accessible decision logs can enable collaboration and learning.
Karol
AI-generated code could be a disaster for the software supply chain. Here’s why.
LLM-produced code could make us much more vulnerable to supply-chain attacks.
Dan Goodin
What Software Developers Can Learn from Self-Driving Cars
Every few decades, something comes along that fundamentally reshapes how we work. Generative AI — whether through coding assistants…
Gwaredd Mountain
Stress, Wellbeing & Growth
What If Being Lazy Was a Good Thing?
Learn the benefits of laziness and how to be tactically lazy.
Ashley Janssen
Why neurodivergent leaders are still made to feel like outsiders
It’s about time that organisations start addressing the structural realities that continue to marginalise neurodivergent professionals in the workplace.
Michelle Carson
Golden Rule
That’s not enough any more
Mike Fisher
3 Leadership Strategies To Create A Healthier Inner World – Scott Cochrane
Scott Cochrane
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:
Have an amazing week!
Andy