🍌 Bottlenecks, A-Players, Expectation Setting, Triage, Work Friends, API Security, Developer Burnout, Good Advice: TMW #465

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

We're back in London this March with something brand new

CTO Craft Con: London returns to the QEII Centre, 9th to 11th March. This year we are introducing something new for senior tech leaders who want to go deeper on AI...

The AI Leadership Lab on 9 March is a half-day, workshop-style experience designed around real leadership questions. Less theory. More practical discussion. Peer-led sessions, hands-on exploration, and space to step back from the noise and focus on impact, teams, and decision-making.

There are now just 10 tickets remaining for the workshop day, showing just how much demand there is for meaningful AI leadership conversations. Don't miss your chance to join us!

The Lab opens three days of community-driven learning and connection at CTO Craft Con London, alongside roundtables, breakfasts, informal networking and an exclusive after-party with peers from across the UK and Europe.

If AI is shaping how you lead, this is the room to be in. Tickets for the main conference are available now for just £599 (Until Friday 30th Jan) and the AI Leadership Lab is just a £249 add-on. No access codes required!

That's it, let's look at some links 😄

PS: We have a load of Mixer events coming up next week - take a look to see if we're coming to your city.

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Bytes: Leading Engineering with Vision | CTO Craft

Explore how visionary engineering leaders align inspiring tech roadmaps with business outcomes, energise teams, and turn strategy into day‑to‑day execution.

CTO Craft

CTO Craft Con - Dates for Your Diary

CTO Craft Con: London

Join CTO Craft Con: London - an intimate, community-centered gathering for engineering leaders to connect, learn through insightful sessions, and build real peer relationships in a supportive environment.

CTO Craft Con: London 2026

CTO Craft Con: Toronto

Join CTO Craft Con: Toronto- an intimate, community-centered gathering for engineering leaders to connect, learn through insightful sessions, and build real peer relationships in a supportive environment.

CTO Craft Con: Toronto 2026

CTO Craft Con: Europe 2026

Join CTO Craft Con Europe 2026 in Amsterdam - an intimate, community-centered gathering for engineering leaders to connect, learn through insightful sessions, and build real peer relationships in a supportive environment.

CTO Craft Con: Europe 2026

Reads of the Week

One bottleneck at a time

Doing the easy thing is often the hard thing.

The Engineering ManagerJames Stanier

The Five Traits That Actually Separate “A Players” from Everyone Else

This article has sat on a shelf, so to speak, for years. My original idea for it came when I was attending and speaking at an HR.

LinkedInGlen Cathey

Leadership, Strategy & Business

The STiCCS framework: expectations setting made easy

Setting expectations shouldn’t be a mind-wrenching task — so relax, make yourself a nice brew, and keep it easy with the STiCCS framework.

Developers as LeadersDevelopers as Leaders

What hospital triage can teach us about planning

Or, what I’ve learned listening to my wife.

JoTJeff

No More Mr. Nice Guy

Why caring means making the hard decisions

Fish Food for ThoughtMike Fisher

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Measuring Engineering ROI

How to Measure Engineering ROI: A Practical Guide for SaaS CTOs. Engineering ROI is elusive — but measurable. This guide breaks down attribution philosophies and provides practical formulas to help CTOs quantify and communicate engineering’s impact.

CTO LogicItzy Sabo

Culture, People & Teams

Work friends are the secret to great culture

ALSO: chat about Claude Cowork gets frothy

Make Work BetterBruce Daisley

No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

Sharing a reluctant, “node & postgres” approach to engineering management for early-stage startups

Antoine BoulangerAntoine Boulanger

Junior Developers in the Age of AI

Companies are ditching junior engineers en masse. They’ll tell you it’s because AI writes better code. They’re right...but also missing the point.

Thoughtful EngineeringChristine Miao

The Blame Game: How Bureaucracy Eats Responsibility - Blog

You’ve seen this before. Something goes wrong at work: a project stalls, a system crashes, a customer complains. Suddenly, the question isn’t “How do we…

Corporate Rebels

Don’t Let Others Get Lost in the Reorg Shuffle: Practical Steps for Managing Organizational Change

Discover practical strategies for helping individual contributors process and adapt to reorganizations without productivity loss, from reinforcing the ‘why’ to adding levity during periods of change. Learn how to communicate organizational changes effectively to your team, clarify what is and isn’t changing for each person, and help rightsize the impact when reorg fatigue sets in.

Allison McMillan/Tavlin Consulting

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Access is The New API | Dante’s Blog

A reflection on how access became something we need to design.

Karlista Dante Lex OkohKarlista Dante Lex Okoh

Why Senior Developers Hate AI (And Why They’re Wrong, But Also Right, But Mostly Uncomfortable)

(From the viewpoint of a Mad Hatter. One who earned his hat the hard way.)

The Curious TechnologistJames Sperring

When your platform team can’t say yes: How away-teaming unlocks stuck roadmaps

The modern product organization is constantly hitting a critical bottleneck: Platform teams are the engine of leverage, but their capacity is finite.

InfoWorldPratik Gupta

8 lessons from tech leadership on scaling teams and AI - Stack Overflow

Stack OverflowEira May

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

The Real Cost of Loving What You Do: The Uncomfortable Truth About Developer Burnout

Table of Contents Introduction The Complexity We Underestimate About Burnout It Takes…

DEV CommunityGiorgi Kobaidze

How I actually get good advice

Ironic coming from the “collaboration sucks” guy

Product for EngineersCharles Cook

How to Get Unstuck: Simple Somatic Regulation Practices

Somatic regulation is the practice of using your body to change cognitive and emotional states instead of relying on top-down thinking alone.

Ness LabsAnne-Laure Le Cunff

TBM 401: Solving Problems the Hard Way

A Career Altering Experience

The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler

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!

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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