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🦝 Politics, Sabotage, AI vs Glue Work, Aging Tech, Repetition, Your Strengths: TMW #482

We're in Toronto this week! See you there?
🌎
Thank you Svitla Systems for sponsoring this week's TMW - empowering businesses worldwide with cutting-edge software engineering and expert consulting services.

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

The CTO Craft team is Toronto, Canada this week for CTO Craft Con - we'll be joined on Tuesday and Wednesday by hundreds of Canada's CTO community for some fantastic discourse, highly useful and impactful talks and a lot of fun and laughter. There might even be space for poutine and a trip to Tim Horton's...

As soon as we get back, we'll be straight into planning for the other big Cons happening this year, in Amsterdam in September, and one for Fintech CTOs in London in November. And, let's not forget our Conversations Roadshow, which will be kicking off in Berlin in June - a busy year indeed!

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

Andy @ CTO Craft

Ps. By the way, we've just launched a discount portal for CTO Craft Slack members, with offers from Stripe, Notion, Airtable, Auth0, AWS and hundreds of others. Now might be the time to sign up!

CTO Craft Con - Dates for Your Diary

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
CTO Craft Con: Fintech
Join CTO Craft Con: Fintech in 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: Fintech
CTO Craft | Conversations Roadshow
Each gathering follows the same small-group, peer-led format, but every event is shaped by its local context. Attendees, facilitators, and discussion topics differ from city to city, reflecting the challenges and opportunities CTOs are experiencing in that region.
Conversations Roadshow
SPONSORED
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AI is Already Inside Your Engineering Org. The Question is Not Adoption, it’s Control

Most AI conversations in engineering focus on hype: productivity gains, flashy demos, and adoption metrics. This session takes a more practical view, exploring what meaningful control over AI looks like inside real engineering organisations.

Johann Beukes, CTO and Chief AI Officer at Svitla Systems, will examine where AI genuinely improves delivery, where it creates new risks, and how leaders can measure impact beyond vanity metrics.

Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of AI’s real value, practical ways to assess success against business outcomes, and stronger judgment on moving from experimentation to sustainable, well-governed AI adoption.

Join us on June 18th. Register here

CTO Craft Mixers Coming Up

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

Leadership, Strategy & Business

How corporate politics actually work
With Ethan Evans, a former Amazon Vice President.
Tech World With Milan NewsletterDr Milan Milanović
Simple Sabotage Field Manual
Simple Sabotage Field Manual - A book by the Alephic team.
When Senior Leaders Sound Junior
Paul did not need better experience. He needed a better way to reveal it.
The Conscious LeaderTaha Hussain
The New Software Economics: Earn the Right to Invest Again, in 90-day Cycles
Twenty-five years of change in the cost structure of technology created a minefield of risk as executives fund software application development,
LiminalArcLeonard Greski

Culture, People & Teams

The skill no one talks about in AI adoption
At #ELC26 last month, a fellow speaker stood up in front of a room full of engineering leaders and pointed to emotional intelligence as the answer to AI adoption resistance. He hadn’t planned it.
LinkedInCarol Palombini
Repeat Until It Hurts
Getting your team from “I didn’t know that” to genuine buy-in
High-Impact EngineeringRoman Nikolaev
TBM 417: Before You Fire All Your Glue People Because of AI
I guess I’m putting together an AI series of sorts.
The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler
AI Broke the Job Interview. Now What?
What’s really happening in hiring rooms in 2026, and what it means for candidates and companies alike.
MonikaMonika

Technology, Operations & Delivery

How to See Aging as a Leading Indicator to See Where Work Hides - Johanna Rothman
When I posted How to See Your Leading, Lagging, and Reliable Estimation Metrics last week, a colleague suggested I was not quite right. He said that Aging is actually the leading indicator for more reliable data. He is absolutely correct. However, we don’t always see the real problem. The reader who emailed me only saw […]
Johanna RothmanJohanna
You Shipped It Fast. But Did You Ship It Right? - Stack Overflow
Stack OverflowPriya Gopalsamy
James Shore: You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs
Agents aren’t a new risk category
The questions have not changed, the speed and variance has
Garry Shutler

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

The Hardest Part of AI Is Letting Go of Our Ego
We were trained to be right. In a world where machines generate faster than we can think, the real challenge is learning to judge instead.
The Engineering TaxAlvaro Lorente
The engineering management memory crisis
For 8 years, my brain was enough. It’s running out of RAM
manager.devAnton Zaides
Strengths into Superpowers - Why You Should Focus on Your Strengths - Yaniv Preiss
The world demands that you fix your weaknesses. So why is working on your strengths your best bet?
Yaniv PreissYaniv Preiss
What I Learned About Time 🕰️
11 Ideas from Laura Vanderkam’s New Book on Time Abundance
Wonder ToolsJeremy Caplan and Laura

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