Sign in Subscribe
8 min read

🦙 Engineering Investment, Glue People, Rethinking Dysfunction, Mechanical Sympathy, Engineering "-ilities", Moral Injury: TMW #478

CTO Craft Conversations: Berlin is coming - why it's important you participate
🏆
Thank you to Nortal for sponsoring this week's issue - a global digital transformation and technology firm that helps governments and enterprises modernise operations through cloud, data and AI, cyber resilience, and digital product design.

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

With the first event of our Conversations Roadshow happening in Berlin in June, we're hard at work pulling together a schedule of impactful discussions with subject matter experts all over Europe and North America. But why should you be interested in this, and what's in it for you?

Carrying on our hugely popular tradition of running roundtable discussions at our CTO Craft Con events, where leaders discuss topics facilitated and guided by a subject matter expert in that area, we're now running dedicated Conversations events to bring the format to different cities.

We know that the quickest learning path is peer-driven - learning with other leaders in the same position as you is unquestionably the most impactful way, and it's also a lot of fun.

So, if you're finding your way as a technology leader, or if you'd like to learn some new approaches, you'll definitely want to be there.

In Berlin, we'll be looking at:

  • Delivering under pressure
  • Building engineer buy-in to security and compliance
  • Scaling teams quickly
  • Burnout as a systems failure
  • and much more.

Tickets are already available - see you there! 🇩🇪

Conversations Roadshow: Berlin
Join CTO Craft in Berlin for the Conversations Roadshow with peer led roundtables, senior facilitators, networking, and insights you’ll use straight away.
Conversations Roadshow

That's it, let's look at some links....

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Con - Dates for Your Diary

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
Conversations Roadshow: Berlin
Join CTO Craft in Berlin for the Conversations Roadshow with peer led roundtables, senior facilitators, networking, and insights you’ll use straight away.
Conversations Roadshow
SPONSORED
CTA Image

Scaling engineering in Central & Eastern Europe

Growing an engineering team should speed things up. In reality, it often slows things down first. More coordination. More overhead. More ways for things to stall.

From what we see across Poland, Bulgaria, and Ukraine, the difference isn’t just talent. It’s how each market behaves once you actually start building the team, from hiring pace to stability and day-to-day dynamics. None of this is a blocker, but it’s the part that usually needs a bit of navigation to get right.

We pulled this into a short report based on our day-to-day insight into these markets. It helps you compare them more realistically before you commit to a direction.

Read the report and learn how to scale your team

CTO Craft Mixers Coming Up

See the whole Mixer calendar here - not in your city yet? Drop us a line!

Reads of the Week

The Vasa
The Vasa Disaster A few years ago, I was working for a client in Stockholm and in some free time, I visited the wreck of the Vasa, the world’s best-preserved 17th-century ship. She’s housed in a museum built specifically around […]
Psych SafetyTom Geraghty
Vibe → Environment → Culture: Why Leadership Gets This Backwards
I spent 15 months as an IC at Dropbox after selling my company. First real job of my life. Didn’t control the environment anymore.
MediumHiten Shah

Leadership, Strategy & Business

TBM 416: Investment Stewardship (As Habit)
I made this little skill if anyone is up for giving it a try.
The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler
Why Good Ideas Die in Organizations (And How to Fix It)
Why do good ideas keep dying in organizations? Clay Parker Jones shares 6 hidden patterns that shape organizational agility, and how to start redesigning them.
IDEO URachel Youngblade
Own the Thinking Process: How Leaders Build Problem-Solving Capability
Learn how leaders build problem-solving capability by owning the thinking process, not the thinking. Discover strategies to improve decision-making.
Katie AndersonKatie Anderson
How Leaders Bounce Back From Failure (Without Losing Their Team’s Trust) | David Burkus
Here’s what the research actually shows about how to bounce back from failure as a leader, and why the conventional playbook gets it backwards.
David BurkusDavid Burkus

Culture, People & Teams

The Complicators, The Drama Aggregators, and The Avoiders
It’s hard to tell what drives each human. This is why my usual last interview question is a very blunt, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I ask everyon
Rands in ReposeName *
TBM 417: Before You Fire All Your Glue People Because of AI
(Sometimes I get excited by a topic and write more than once a week.
The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler
Why Smart Teams Overcommit And How Leaders Make It Worse - Mountain Goat Software
Smart teams often overcommit for understandable reasons. This article explains how leadership pressure and anchoring turn optimism into missed goals…
Mountain Goat SoftwareMike Cohn
Turning Around a Struggling Team │ Cultivated
Most struggling teams are not suffering from a lack of activity. They are suffering from a lack of understanding. Before you change anything, you need to see it clearly. This is the approach I have used — and coached others in — for turning around struggling teams.
CultivatedRob Lambert
When “Positive” Becomes Problematic: Rethinking Dysfunction in Organizations
In today’s organisational conversations, a near-universal agreement has formed around what counts as “good.” Words like trust, transparency, collaboration, and innovation roll off the tongue, painting a picture of optimism and progress.
LinkedInAlon Schwartz

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Mechanical sympathy
Use the tool as meant to be used.
✰Vicki Boykis✰
AI Is Killing Software Engineering “-ilities”: What Still Matters in 2026
Maintainability, reusability, and readability were never universal principles. They were responses to a world where writing software was expensive. As AI removes that constraint, the real bottleneck shifts to how systems behave, scale, and survive continuous change.
The Engineering TaxAlvaro Lorente
Dropping sprints: a year with Shape Up
Reflections on moving from scrum to shape up (and from maintenance mode to high output and happier engineers)
manager.devAnton Zaides
The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code
Five git commands that tell you where a codebase hurts before you open a single file. Churn hotspots, bus factor, bug clusters, and crisis patterns.
Ally Piechowski“Ally Piechowski”

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

The Wound Beneath the Burnout
Why millions of people aren’t exhausted — they’re morally broken. And why your organization is treating it with scented candles.
MediumZsolt Farkas
Work Anxiety • Ness Labs Newsletter
The Ness Letters are a weekly newsletter by Ness Labs, exploring how we can think better, work smarter, and live happier.
Ness Labs
The six self-leadership gaps shaping your life
Why things feel off and where it usually begins
SageformAmelia Kruse
What Does This Ask of Us?
A Blame-Spiral Interrupt for Executive Teams
Emma ChurchmanEmma Churchman

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!

Campus by CTO Craft: The Go-to Resource for Senior Technology Leaders
Created for CTOs, by CTOs: A transformative learning community for senior technology leaders in startups and scale-ups
CTO Craft Campus

Interested in sponsoring TMW or any of our events? Check out some stats here

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

Published by:

Andy Skipper