8 min read

🐏 Product and Eng Trust, Good Leaders, Lousy Coaching, After Reorgs, Complainers, Tech Debt, Cognitive Load, Boredom: TMW #446

How much trust is there between Product and Eng in your team?
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Hello there, welcome to the week!

Building Bridges: Rebuilding Trust Between Product and Engineering

This week's favourite community discussion focused on a common challenge: the friction between product and engineering teams. This tension often arises from over-specified requirements, leaving engineers feeling disengaged and uninvolved in the product's vision. Members discussed their own experiences and explored strategies to address this issue by fostering greater engineering ownership and building trust.

We found that true collaboration begins by integrating engineers earlier in the product definition process. This ensures they have critical context and a sense of ownership from the outset. A key approach shared by one member involves using the Liberating Structures TRIZ method to facilitate open, face-to-face dialogue. This method allows teams to safely air grievances and build empathy, serving as a foundation for trust. Our key takeaways reinforce this point: align success metrics to shared outcomes, engage engineers in user interactions, and establish dedicated roles or workshops to bridge communication gaps.

That's it, on with the links! See you next Monday

Andy @ CTO Craft

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CTO Craft Con: Berlin 2025
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CTO Craft Con will bring together over 500 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, March 2026.

Reads of the Week

Going direct
The org chart does not control the flow of communication. In fact, you’re faster if you ignore it entirely.
From Trees to Forest: The Real Impact of AI on Developer Productivity | Khiliad
MIT study shows AI delivers 26% productivity gains, not 10x marketing promises. Discover how AI truly transforms developer workflows from tactical to strategic thinking.

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Good Leader, Bad Leader — Ant Murphy
I worked with a VP of Product who said something that really stuck with me; “My job isn’t to make my life easier, it’s to make my team’s life easier.” Servant leadership in a nutshell 👏 When I reflect on my career I feel very grateful to have had some many amazing leaders and mentors over th
A Guide to Lousy Coaching - Leadership Freak
Unintentional sabotage is still destructive. Lousy coaching personalities create confusion during development conversations. They use words like “coaching” but really mean instructing. Don’t be: Fix-It Freddy Leaky Linda Vague-asaurus Rex Support-Me-Not Susan Bad coaching isn’t a mistake. It’s a catastrophe. Included here are 5 ways to improve your coaching.
They Know More Than I Do! (Managing an Expert Team When You Can’t Do Their Jobs) - Matt Schouten
This post began as a WordCamp US talk proposal. The core ideas are worth sharing, so I adapted it from […]
Blockers Are Urgent, While Friction Endures
Blockers trigger fire drills, but friction quietly shapes customer and employee behavior every single day. (Additional bonus included - The Toilet Paper Roll Test)

Culture, People & Teams

5 Essential Things Every Leader Should Evaluate After a Reorganization
When you’re suddenly leading a new department after a reorganization, you need to quickly assess the landscape without the usual onboarding grace period. This guide outlines five critical areas to evaluate—from goals and team effectiveness to culture and barriers—plus how bringing people together through strategic gatherings can accelerate your success as a new leader.
Social and Organizational Heuristics
Mental Models that might be useful.
How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining? | Andi Roberts - Executive Coach | Leadership Trainer | Facilitator
Discover why employees complain and how leaders can turn workplace negativity into ownership, accountability, and stronger team engagement.
How teams grow organically
Frederick’s delirious rants
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Technology, Operations & Delivery

Building an AI-first platform strategy
An AI-first platform strategy balances governance and enablement by adopting a “just enough, just in time” approach.
Unlocking high software engineering pace: Partner with Product to pay down technical debt
Technical debt is a partnership problem, not just an engineering problem.
Vibe coding is not the same as AI-Assisted engineering.
Can you really ‘vibe’ your way to production-ready software?
Cognitive load is what matters
There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let’s focus on something more fundamental. What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel when going through the code.

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

The Fear Factor: How to Turn Anxiety into Action as a Leader – Scott Cochrane
Two questions to ask when you get stuck - Meeting Notes Newsletter
Learn how to get unstuck at work (and life). Transform overwhelm into action, gain clarity, and move forward with confidence with these two questions.
I Can’t Worry About The Whole World
I reduced news overload with curated attention: focus locally and preserve compassion through selective awareness.
You Need to Be Bored. Here’s Why.
If you embrace the skill of boredom, you might get better at confronting life’s bigger questions around meaning, happiness, and work. When we are bored, our brain moves to its default mode network, which are structures that switch on when you don’t have anything else to think about. When this happens, your mind wanders and thinks about, for example, big questions of meaning in your life. This makes us uncomfortable, but this kind of thinking is beneficial. To begin, commute with nothing, not even the radio. Try phone-free periods of 15 minutes and longer. And have device-free meals with your family.

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy