🍓 Restless Teams, Two-Way Doors, AI and Team Tensions, Healthy Conflict, Open Weights, Bad Prioritisation, Token Pricing: TMW #493
In Stockholm on October 15th? You can't miss this...
Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!
The first of this autumn's Conversations Roadshow events will be in Stockholm on October 15th, and it's filling up quickly... Here's what you can expect!
- We'll begin the day with a fika just for women in engineering leadership - if you're interested in joining us for this, drop me a line
- The day's roundtable discussions will begin with a conversation facilitated by the wonderful Anna Hedlund - the group will chat about the pressures of needing to move mountains with minimal resource
- Later in the day, Paul Lunow from Vention will lead a discussion about how to evolve your SDLC into an AI-first one, sharing how his team approached it
Altogether, there are nine roundtable discussions lined up, each with an experienced facilitator and expert in their subject. Tickets are just €249, but they're in short supply - get in quick if you'd like to join us!
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.
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.
Matt 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: 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 | 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.
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CTO Craft Events Coming Up
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- 🏴 Manchester Mixer - September 16th
- 🇩🇪 Berlin Mixer - October 7th
- 🇵🇹 Lisbon Mixer - coming soon!
- 🇺🇸 NYC Mixer - coming soon!
- 🇨🇦 Waterloo Mixer - coming soon!
See the whole calendar here - not in your city yet? Drop us a line!
Reads of the Week
Zugunruhe
Why your best people get restless, and what to do when they start facing the window
Mike Fisher
The lights were never off
The man who coined “dark factory” runs at Level 4. The man who popularized it calls it unproven. The teams who built one never say the words.
Ilko Kacharov
Leadership, Strategy & Business
Two-way doors sometimes lock behind you
Reversible decisions are sometimes not static!
Jeff
Why Leaders Are Often the Last to Know
The impact of leadership behaviour on the truth within an organisation
Lee Clayton
TBM 434: How Maps Can Hide Problems
If what you are mapping is incoherent, don’t fall in love with the map (or your personal ability to navigate with it).
John Cutler
Delegation For Introverted Managers
How to lead without draining your energy.
Alex Ponomarev
Culture, People & Teams
Conversing from behind the curtain: new tensions for teams working alongside AI | ustwo engineering blog
What’s making engineering feel strange today - from the Wizard of Oz to authorship ambiguity, change magnitude, and completion deference.
Nick Hegarty
Tech Lead in a Broken Team? What You Need to Do First
Dev Leader Weekly 150
Dev Leader
Designing For Healthy Conflict in An Engineering Team
How to stop mediating every disagreement and build a team that can handle conflict independently.
James Samuel
Team cohesion: what anthropology teaches us about holding…
Team cohesion isn’t built through trust exercises. It’s built through small daily acts. What Alan Fiske’s new book teaches us about the real glue.
Technology, Operations & Delivery
Yes you can measure engineering | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
Jade shares how he likes to measure the value delivery of engineering organizations using the ValueSum metric.
Jade Rubick
The Rise of Open Weights — and the fall of commercial AI?
Open weights models — mostly from China — are closing in on OpenAI and Anthropic. A Scott Logic scrollytelling story on how open weights went from fringe to frontier-competitive.
The Best Prioritization Is No Prioritization
The best way to prioritize... is to not prioritize.
Ways to think about token pricing — Benedict Evans
AI is in a supply crunch today, but what happens when we come out of it? How and where will supply, demand, price, capacity and capex get back into equilibrium? Today, model labs can name their price, but why won’t they end up as low-margin commodity infrastructure?
Benedict Evans
Stress, Wellbeing & Growth
Reclaiming purpose and aliveness (by Frederic Laloux) - Blog
These are genuinely hard times to be a leader. The uncertainty feels different now—not the familiar turbulence of a difficult quarter or a shifting…
Beyond Time Management • Ness Labs
The Ness Letters are a weekly newsletter by Ness Labs, exploring how we can think better, work smarter, and live happier.
The Antithesis Principle
What Smart People Miss and Wise People See
Shreyas Doshi
Courage to be Disliked - Leadership Freak
If everyone likes you, you’ve lost yourself. Meaningful decisions disappoint someone. Agendas collide. Values conflict. The courage to lead includes the courage to be disliked. Click for more…
Dan Rockwell
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