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🥒 Leadership Sabotage, Strategy Failures, Feedback Exercises, Silos, QA Won the War, Building Influence: TMW #480

Want to hear in person how our recent survey is helping define the next stage in product engineering?

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

It's a public holiday here in the UK, so just a quick reminder that tickets are now on sale for our limited-availability Conversations events taking place in Berlin, Stockholm and London later in the year, with New York launching very soon. These will sell out, so don't hold off if you'd like to join the party.

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
Conversations Roadshow: Stockholm
Join CTO Craft in Stockholm for the Conversations Roadshow with peer led roundtables, senior facilitators, networking, and insights you’ll use straight away.
Conversations Roadshow
Conversations Roadshow: London
Join CTO Craft in London 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
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Engineering 2028: A Leadership Masterclass

Thank you to all those who joined us online for part one, "The Maturity Roadmap: From Early Adoption to AI-Enabled Leadership". Now join Damilah for part two, "Engineering 2028: A Leadership Masterclass" in person in London!

A focused masterclass on leading human + AI teams at scale. Hear from Iain Bishop on how engineering organisations are evolving, and what it takes to stay effective.

Expect practical insights on team design, culture, and the real impact of AI beyond experimentation.

📍 7 May | 6:00–8:30pm | London

Register here

CTO Craft Mixers Coming Up

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

Reads of the Week

Becoming a Business Leader, Not Just a Technical One
Stop treating business fluency as someone else’s job
It Depends: Lessons in Technology LeadershipKevin Goldsmith

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Games Managers Play - Leadership Sabotaging - Yaniv Preiss
We’re all playing games on a daily basis. They are often harmful, causing all participants to come out with a negative feeling. This is also true for work.
Yaniv PreissYaniv Preiss
Common Engineering Strategy failure factors
Make your strategy more robust to avoid common mistakes
Engineering StrategyAleix Morgadas
Four Executives. Four Problems. One Backlog.
Why Nobody Owns the Outcome.
The Tech DilemmaSteve Taplin
Measure Less to Learn More: Using Fewer, Higher-quality Metrics to Capture What Matters
Too many experiment metrics can make meaningful changes harder to detect. Learn how Discord used simulations and Principal Component Analysis to maximize signal and reduce noise.
Log InJake Mainwaring

Culture, People & Teams

Managing a team that didn’t choose you
The lie of the 30-60-90 onboarding plan: an honest self-retro after 6 months as an EM
manager.devAnton Zaides
Fun Feedback Exercises & Activities to Do With Your Team
Every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you get to work on something that is so fun you can’t believe it’s work. For me, collaborating with…
MediumKim Scott
How to one-on-one | Ben Balter
Most 1:1s waste your team’s only protected synchronous time on status updates. Here’s how to run ones worth showing up for.
Ben BalterBen Balter
Organizational silos: what the Titanic teaches us about information…
Organizational silos killed the Titanic. Seven ice warnings ignored. This is what progressive organizations learned from it.
Corporate Rebels

Technology, Operations & Delivery

48 Days Without an Incident on Our SaaS Platform | The Learning
After 2 years of firefighting, we reached 48 days incident-free. Here’s what actually changed — and how we got there.
The Good, the Waste and the LEARNINGThomas Deligny
What Changes When Your Team Builds With AI
Alexandra Newman A reader of my last post Agile constraints for teams shipping non-deterministic systems asked:
Elena’s SubstackElena Luneva
QA Engineering Won the War: Why AI Is Shifting Engineering From Building to Validation
As AI makes code cheaper to generate, the real leverage in software engineering is moving toward validation, judgment, guardrails, and domain knowledge.
The Engineering TaxAlvaro Lorente
Estimating AI’s carbon footprint.
Or, generating equations with as few unknowns as possible.
JoTJeff

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

What AI Reveals About How You Work With People
When AI disappoints, you tweak your prompt. When people do, you rarely look inward, but the same habits make you better with both.
Product CoalitionNoa Ganot
Building Influence Within the Team
A System That Works
High-Impact EngineeringRoman Nikolaev
The Pull of the New • 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 hidden cost of saying yes
The small yeses that shape your workload, positioning and burnout risk
PR not ERNatalie J Maher

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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CTO Craft Campus

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Have an amazing week!

Andy

Published by:

Andy Skipper