Sep 15, 2025 8 min read

🦩 Decision Frameworks, Building Influence, Motivating Teams, Escaping KTLO, Reducing WIP, Quiet Cracking: TMW #448

Free event on Oct 14 - Emotional Intelligence for CTOs

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Only one week until CTO Craft Con: Berlin - just a few tickets are still available! Use the discount code TMW100 to take €100 off.

Hello there, welcome to the week!

Harmonising Product & Engineering Strategy

Last week, a community member reached out for collective wisdom on improving the alignment between Product and Engineering priorities, specifically exploring how to empower engineering-led initiatives and long-term scalability planning while crafting a longer-term product strategy.

One of the key pieces of feedback was that it's essential to quantify all initiatives based on their business impact or the risk they address. A helpful strategy is to dedicate a fixed percentage, for instance, 20% of the team's capacity, specifically for engineering needs. This approach ensures that resolving technical debt and refactoring are not treated as separate tasks but are instead integrated directly into the development of new features.

How might your organisation shift its internal language to articulate engineering needs in terms of tangible business value and strategic risk, fostering a shared understanding?

If you're in the CTO Craft community Slack, don't miss these great discussions that also happened last week, alongside a whole bunch of others:

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

Andy @ CTO Craft

PS. Don't forget to take part in our survey about scaling AI projects to production - it only takes a few minutes!

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Meet Innostax

CTO Craft Con - Dates for Your Diary

Reads of the Week

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Culture, People & Teams

[Survey] Mind the Gap: Bridging from Sandbox to Scale

We know many tech leaders are experimenting with AI - but making the leap from sandbox to scale is where it gets tricky.

That’s why, together with our partners at Ten10, we’re running a short survey to capture real stories, lessons, and insights from across the tech community.

Your input will help shine a light on what really works (and what doesn’t) when turning AI experiments into lasting business value.

Complete the Survey