🐢 Incident Culture, Focus, Important Details, AI vs QA Teams, Politics, Monorepos, Crises, People Pleasing: TMW #491

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

CTO Craft has a busy run of conferences ahead! In Europe, CTO Craft Con: Europe comes to Amsterdam on 29-30 September 2026, covering AI infrastructure strategy, organisational design and platform thinking, with speakers from CircleCI, Mozilla, Wolt and Monzo among others. The Conversations Roadshow also stops in Stockholm on 15 October, running small group discussions on topics like budget pressure, AI code governance and decision fatigue, before CTO Craft Con: Fintech takes over the Minster Building in London on 2-3 November, focused on AI adoption, compliance led delivery and platform architecture in regulated firms such as Monzo, Zopa Bank and Lloyds.

The autumn continues with Conversations: London on 20 October, where roundtables tackle AI and burnout, empathy in leadership and building talent pipelines, followed by Conversations: New York on 8 December at The Hoxton in Williamsburg, running the same peer led format around tech, leadership, culture and strategy.

Looking further ahead, our flagship CTO Craft Con: London returns to the QEII Centre on 15-17 March 2027 to mark CTO Craft's tenth anniversary, bringing around five hundred attendees together across strategy, culture, delivery and personal development, with past speakers including leaders from Github, Google, Amazon, O'Reilly, Apple and many more.

I'll be attending all the conferences, so if you'd like to come and say hello, I'd love to meet you!

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

Andy @ CTO Craft

Ps. If you're in an engineering leadership role, you absolutely need to be on top of the latest data on compensation and long-term incentives - have a look at our recent Compensation Report for all the latest insights.

Compensation Survey Report 2026 | CTO Craft

Welcome to the 2026 CTO Compensation Report, presented by CTO Craft and Albany.

CTO CraftMatt Hunt

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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Nominations Now Open: CTO Craft 100 - 2026 | CTO Craft

We’re excited to announce that nominations are now open for the Global CTO 100 - a brand new initiative from CTO Craft that celebrates the technology and engineering leaders defining the future of our industry.

CTO CraftMatt Hunt

CTO Craft Events Coming Up

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Manchester Mixer - July 22nd
• 🇩🇪 Berlin Mixer - July 29th
• 🇮🇪 Dublin Mixer - August 20th

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

Reads of the Week

Doing the right thing when things go wrong

When customers rely on you, minutes matter in an incident. Here’s the process Fin’s engineers follow to mitigate issues and learn from them.

The Intercom BlogMark Gorman

Why You Still Can’t Focus At Work

Even with a great system, focus is still fragile.

Thriving In EngineeringAlex Ponomarev

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Mission to Metrics

How aspiration becomes execution at scale

The Leadership Principles of Product EngineeringAnnie Zhou

A Decade at Block, Part 1: The Best Leaders Know Which Details Matter

What I learned about the best leaders at Block

Software Engineering Career Advice NewsletterRahul Thathoo

Netflix CPTO on AI and the future of product and tech roles | Elizabeth Stone

Elizabeth Stone, CPTO of Netflix, on managing AI-era product teams, the rise of systems thinking, and how to build excellence as an operating system

Lenny's NewsletterLenny Rachitsky

Cascading messages effectively

It’s not just shouting louder.

JoTJeff

Culture, People & Teams

Dark patterns: Downsizing QA teams in the age of AI

Why this may be happening and why optimizing for the wrong things could land your teams and orgs in trouble and a pragmatic take on what to do instead.

automation hacksGaurav Singh

4 Hidden Traps of Team Dynamics

Many leaders believe that diverse teams naturally produce better ideas and decisions. But difference creates value only when leaders can navigate the friction that accompanies different perspectives. Four common leadership traps—certainty, inconsistency between words and actions, emotional reactivity, and self-justification—can quietly erode trust, collaboration, and performance. The authors explain why these patterns emerge and how they prevent teams from realizing the benefits of difference. They then offer six practical leadership actions to counter them: cultivate self-awareness, return to respect during conflict, communicate with candor, seek the full story before drawing conclusions, foster shared ownership, and consistently reinforce these behaviors through action. Leaders who develop these habits can transform disagreement from a source of tension into a catalyst for stronger relationships, better decisions, and sustained organizational performance.

Harvard Business ReviewSusan MacKenty Brady

What does “playing politics” mean for software engineers?

Crucial Conversations: The Book That Made Me Rethink Every Hard 1:1

A manager’s guide to the book about the story you make up before you open your mouth.

The Good BossGaurav Jain

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Always Go With a Monorepo

Veteran CTO who built successful companies through empathic leadership and mastery of software delivery - from sustainable code to stakeholder trust. Now exploring the future of empathic and sustainable tech.

The cost of saying yes has changed

The cost of writing code dropped; the cost of owning it didn’t. A framework for deciding which changes are actually cheap in the AI era.

The GitHub BlogDalia Abuadas

Code Yellow, Code Red

What to do during engineering crises.

The Engineering ManagerJames Stanier

Where the bottleneck goes when agents write the code | zach wills

Adding capacity never removes a constraint, it relocates it. I’ve been running fleets of coding agents since I managed a swarm of 20 of them…

zach willsZach Wills

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Being a Leader when you’re a People Pleaser

My mornings were an anxious mess: rushing to start, rushing from one meeting to the next, already behind before the day had really begun.

Jamie Smith WebbJamie Smith Webb

Making Friends with Error • Ness Labs

The Ness Letters are a weekly newsletter by Ness Labs, exploring how we can think better, work smarter, and live happier.

Ness Labs

Fatigue in Disguise: The Neurobiology of Burnout, Mood, and Concentration

Fatigue is normal—burnout is not. What happens in our brains when we’re exhausted? And what’s the science behind keeping our fire burning so we can stay focused on our goals? Tap in to find out.

The Neuroproductivity HubWayne Lie

How life was different during the early Internet

AI for nostalgia’s sake

The Looking GlassJulie Zhuo

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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Have an amazing week!

Andy