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🦬 CTO Compensation, Building Agency, Easy Conversations, Being Helpful, Skip-levels, Backpressure, Data Quality: TMW #484

The 2026 CTO Craft Compensation Report is here!

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week

The 2026 CTO Craft Compensation Report is here!

We've partnered once again with Albany Partners to gather insights from nearly 500 CTO Craft members across the UK, Europe, North America and Asia on what's really happening with pay, equity, and retention in today's market.

Covering everything from salary negotiation gaps to the stabilisation of flexible working and AI becoming a core part of the CTO role, this year's findings paint a clear picture of how the role and its rewards are evolving and offers insights into what all these trends mean. This is vital data if you're about to renegotiate your package, switch roles or are looking to calibrate your current package against the market.

Dive into the full findings here:

Compensation Survey Report 2026 | CTO Craft
Welcome to the 2026 CTO Compensation Report, presented by CTO Craft and Albany.
CTO CraftMatt Hunt

Next up in the CTO Craft events calendar is Conversations: Berlin on June 23rd, which is coming up very fast! The format is a number of expert-led roundtables on topics like:

  • Delivery under pressure
  • Security without slowdown
  • Burnout as a systems failure
  • Shipping with agents

Tickets are very limited for this one, so if you're interested in joining, get in quick:

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

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
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CTO Craft Events Coming Up

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

Reads of the Week

Beyond “Taking Responsibility”: Why Leading for Agency is the Future of Modern Management - Crisp’s Blog
In recent years, a new word has steadily climbed the ranks of leadership literature and corporate strategy sessions: Agency. While many managers intuitively grasp that it has something to do with…
Crisp's BlogTomas Björkholm
What Kept Me Going: Lessons in Resilience
Reflections on resilience after six months of unemployment
Faye BenfieldFaye Benfeld

Leadership, Strategy & Business

The Conversation Before the Conversation
The conversations leaders regret aren’t usually the hard ones. They’re the easy ones we postpone.
It Depends: Lessons in Technology LeadershipKevin Goldsmith
Prioritization Happens In Layers — Ant Murphy
In this post, I break down why most prioritization frameworks fail in practice. Using a first-principles approach, I explain how prioritization actually happens in layers—from vision and strategy down to backlog decisions—and why the real problem is often happening higher up the stack.
Ant MurphyAnt Murphy
TBM 424: Why We Help (And How To Stay Helpful)
I have been thinking a lot about self-care, especially for people who find themselves pulled into helping people and making things better. The desire to help can be a gift. It can make you notice pain other people have normalized. It can help you imagine futures that are more coherent, humane, and effective. It can give you the energy to push against inertia. And it can give you the patience to nurture something that others might give up on too quickly.
The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler
Trust, Ownership, Feedback, and Excellence
The engineering teams I look back on as truly great share less than people assume. Smart people, of course. Doing this work well is hard, and the teams I’m thinking of were all made up of people who were good at it. But smart, capable people are also on plenty
Sleeping PotatoTom Mango

Culture, People & Teams

The Secret to Skip-level One-on-ones
How to Build a Great Engineering Culture: Article 5
Mark Grebler’s SubstackMark Grebler
Interviewing in the age of AI
How companies should adapt interviews to AI
dein.fr - Charles-Axel DeinCharles-Axel Dein
“okay” vs excellent engineering teams
7 small gaps
manager.devAnton Zaides
The Ask
Coffee in hand, I sit down in the Cave. Any Tuesday during the work week, a sip, and I parse the calendar. 1:1 — he’s fine. Status meeting — listen. Staff me
Rands in ReposeName *

Technology, Operations & Delivery

The Planes Aren’t Coming
Trading predictable delivery for predictable learning
High-Impact EngineeringRoman Nikolaev
Most data quality issues are caught by accident
A lightweight approach to automated anomaly detection using BigQuery TimesFM and Dbt
Data Platform EngineeringRobert Sahlin
What “done” means when you’re shipping AI features
AI broke the old definition of “done.” You’re no longer shipping vending machines—you’re shipping probabilistic behavior distributions.
Jeff GothelfJeff Gothelf
Backpressure is all you need
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
Lucas F. CostaLucas F. Costa

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

What Your Manager Is Thinking When You Complain
Three things managers notice when they hear you complain during 1-on-1 meetings
Tokyo Tech LeadAdler Hsieh
EQ is not just about what you say. It’s your body language too.
Understand your “tells,” send the right signals, and other ways to reinforce your message.
Wes Kao's NewsletterWes Kao
Circle of Competence - Mental Model
The best solution might be outside of your expertise.
PerspectiveshipMichał Poczwardowski
Burnout, Depression, and other Perks of Leadership
A good friend of mine who was an elementary principal gave me the greatest bit of advice when I got my first principalship. He told me to…
MediumBart Elliott

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