May 19, 2025 8 min read

🦧 Architecture Decisions, People-First Leadership, AI in Interviews, Root Cause Labeling, Expensive Microservices, Overloaded Devs: TMW #432

It's a big week for Mixers! Are you joining one?

📮

Thanks to Postman for sponsoring this issue of Tech Manager Weekly - a single platform for designing, building, and scaling APIs.

Hello there, good to see you again

Reverse Engineer Your Stakeholders!

A recent discussion in the CTO Craft community focused on helping a team member improve their ability to summarise their technical work orally, highlighting the importance of understanding the audience. Effectively distilling intricate details into a clear narrative hinges on the speaker's ability to "reverse engineer" their listeners' needs and knowledge. Difficulty often arises not from a lack of technical understanding, but from failing to anticipate what information will resonate and how it should be framed for a specific audience. Truly impactful communication requires a synthesis of information tailored to the stakeholder.

Strategies like structured frameworks and practice can help organise thoughts and delivery, but the without audience empathy, the response can be pretty tepid. By actively considering the listeners' motivations, background, interests, and objectives, individuals can craft summaries that are not only concise but also highly relevant and engaging. Honing this ability to "reverse engineer" the audience's perspective transforms technical summaries from mere data dumps into meaningful dialogues.

What practical techniques can your teams employ to better understand and cater to the diverse needs of their audiences when communicating technical work?

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

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

From our Sponsors

Secure, Scalable API Development - Without Slowing Your Team Down

If you're leading engineering or security teams, you know the cost of fragmented tooling and poor API governance. Postman’s new Spec Hub and BYOK encryption offer a clear path forward—bringing design, testing, and security together on a platform your developers already use, so you can scale with confidence and enforce standards without friction.

This is how modern teams are scaling API governance - read the full breakdown

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