Sign in Subscribe
8 min read

🥐 Productive Culture, Executive Loop, Trust vs Potential, Roadmap vs Sales, Developer Workflow Design, Emotional Tolerance: TMW #497

Has Engineering stopped being the bottleneck?
🐳
This week's TMW is sponsored by Skiller Whale - a coaching solution that feels like pairing, pinpoints gaps, and accelerates 'learning from experience' for engineers of any level

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

When Engineering Stops Being the Bottleneck

The CTO Craft community got into a good back-and-forth this week after a member mentioned their engineering team had roughly quadrupled its throughput using AI, without adding headcount. The consensus that formed pretty quickly: speeding up engineering doesn't remove the bottleneck, it just relocates it. For some, it moves to the pace of customer feedback - as one member put it, "people driven process will always be the bottleneck, because even at the most efficient, we still need to eat and sleep." For others it's a batch-size problem: plenty of requests are small and get absorbed easily, but plenty more are tangled up in bigger concepts that still take just as long to properly define, however fast the build phase has become. And a few pointed at something structural - product-to-engineering ratios that were set for a world where delivery was the slow part, not definition.

From there the conversation went a level deeper. Someone posed it as a thought experiment: say you actually solved the product management bottleneck - what breaks next? Their guess was that it becomes a question of how much change clients and users can actually absorb, and how often. That points toward a different way of working, where product, engineers and customers make decisions together in much smaller batches, optimising for learning rather than volume. It also raises a genuinely awkward question for a lot of businesses: what happens to the customer relationship once the client, not the team, is the thing holding delivery back? The thread wrapped with a blunt take that a lot of people nodded along to - this isn't really an engineering problem, and engineers shouldn't be left to solve it alone.

Worth asking yourself: is it a product problem, a customer relationship problem, or something in how the org is put together - and who actually owns fixing it where you work?

That's it, let's look at some links! See you next week

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
SPONSORED
CTA Image

AI is changing how engineering teams work... But what does that mean for engineering leadership?

In this CTO Craft Bytes session, Hywel Carver, CEO and Co-founder of Skiller Whale, joins CTO Craft founder Andy Skipper to explore what happens when AI becomes embedded across the development lifecycle.

They’ll discuss what should remain firmly human, how organisations can move beyond simply adopting AI tools to becoming truly AI-first, and what this means for team structures, hiring and measuring productivity. They’ll also explore how leaders can protect coaching, mentorship and culture as engineering becomes increasingly AI-driven.

A practical conversation about balancing AI-powered efficiency with effective leadership and the human side of engineering.

Register for the free event 👉

CTO Craft Mixers Coming Up

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

Reads of the Week

Good Culture is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
AI definitely helps with productivity, but only when you have the right culture in place first!
Engineering LeadershipGregor Ojstersek

Leadership, Strategy & Business

The executive loop | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
The simple loop executives use
Jade Rubick - Engineering LeadershipJade Rubick
You cannot manage your peers
How do you manage underperforming peers in a small team with no leadership from above? On the two things make this hard, and what you can actually do when nobody is in charge.
Technically FeasibleLouise Deason
Culture doesn’t execute strategy—people do
<p>With expanded access to learner data and AI-driven insights, organizations face new ethical questions. This panel explores privacy, transparency, algorithmic fairness and how CLOs can build trust while leveraging the […]</p>\n
Chief Learning OfficerSandra Mohr
What Actually Happens When Sales Overrides Your Roadmap
You spend weeks getting alignment on a roadmap and only three days later, you sit in a meeting with Sales and the CEO, and they force a new item onto it.
InsideProductOrgStephanie

Culture, People & Teams

Most Conflict Starts With Team Agreements No One Made
Unclear expectations cost teams more than heavy workloads. Learn how to write team agreements covering communication, collaboration, standards, and support. Replace assumptions with clear agreements using the Team Washing Instructions Canvas (template included)
Demystify CultureGustavo Razzetti
Lack of trust kills organisational potential
How to rebuild trust between Product, the CEO and the rest of the organisation
The Underconfident OverachieverEmma van Dijkum
When A Developer Misses The Deadline, Who Owns It?
Dev Leader Weekly 155
Dev Leader WeeklyDev Leader
Coach and judge
Sometimes coaching goes too far. You need to become the judge.
Jim Grey on software managementBen Cotton

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Responsible AI adoption needs developer workflow design - Stack Overflow
Organizations cannot solve shadow AI with a document employees read once. They need to make responsible use easier than improvised use.
Stack OverflowDr. Gleb Tsipursky
Human judgment doesn’t leave the software factory. It relocates.
A field guide to building a software factory that still has an owner.
ElevateAddy Osmani
Fix This Is Not Enough, Even When an Agent Wrote the Code
Reviewing AI-authored code increasingly means verifying intent, not just implementation. The AIR formula makes comments useful without turning them into essays
Packt Deep EngineeringPackt Deep Engineering
Why not just ship it?
The AI evaluation process we use to decide which changes ship
Fin IdeasPedro Tabacof

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

The Engineering Manager’s Guide to Emotional Tolerance
Five ways to lead with emotion without losing yourself in the process.
Thriving In EngineeringAlex Ponomarev
Building burnout-resistant teams | e27
Workplace burnout is shaped by organisational practices, making workload, interruptions, recovery and management key leadership concerns
e27Dr Zoe Wyatt-Potage
Selling out
In 1973, Tom Lehrer famously sang that “selling out is easy to do”. That may have been true in the seventies, but it’s not true today: selling out requires both…
The Right Way To Think About Purpose
Live a hundred lives in one or live one life so fiercely it feels like a hundred.
Kelvin KaineKelvin Kaine

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