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6 min read

🥕 Auditing Your Org, Intimidating Strategy, Decisions, First Teams, Hiring Breakpoints, Code Reviews, Quality, Burnout Recovery: TMW #502

Coming in October - Conversations for CTOs in Stockholm and London
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This week's TMW is sponsored by Okta and Auth0 - platforms to secure all types of identity from AI agents to your customers, employees, and partners.

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

A massive thank you to all of you who joined us in Amsterdam for CTO Craft: Con last week - it was great to meet so many of you from right across Europe and beyond (25 countries represented!). A special shout-out to Carol Palombini, our MC for the two days, and to everyone in team CTO Craft for making it such a success.

No time to kick off our shoes yet, though - we'll be back on the road very shortly, with Conversations events in Stockholm on October 15th and London on October 20th. If you're nearby, and would like to join a group of peers for some interactive learning and sharing on a variety of topics, check out the links below.

Tickets are still available for our CTO Craft Con: Fintech event in London in November, as well as the big one, CTO Craft Con: London in March, where we'll be celebrating 10 years of CTO Craft. Join us for something special...

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

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Con - Dates for Your Diary

SPONSORED
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CTO Craft Bytes: CISO vs. CTO Pressure: Turning Identity into an Engine for Velocity and Trust

Engineering and security leaders are often balancing competing priorities, with CTOs focused on speed and delivery while CISOs prioritise risk and control. In this practical fireside chat, we’ll explore how engineering leaders can build stronger relationships with security teams, align around shared goals, and use identity architecture to improve both security and developer velocity.

The discussion will cover why the CTO–CISO divide exists, how customer identity can act as a shared framework between the two functions, and what leading organisations are doing to turn security from a bottleneck into an enabler of business agility.

We’re also pleased to welcome Mariano Messina, Founder & CEO at Argorex, who joins the session as moderator, bringing additional expertise and perspective to the conversation.

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

The Outsider’s Audit
Due Diligence on Your Own Org
It Depends: Lessons in Technology LeadershipKevin Goldsmith

Leadership, Strategy & Business

The Missing Instructor
Why leadership development has always been rate limited by attention
Fish Food for ThoughtMike Fisher
How Strategy Stopped Intimidating Me
One mentor turned strategy from something mysterious into something learnable
Ryan GreenhallRyan Greenhall
How Decisions Show What is Prioritised
How decisions show what an organisation is optimising for compared to what they may say. Actions speak louder than words
LinkedInLead Different HQ
The Manager’s Path in the Age of AI
This week, I gave a talk at LDX3 New York. When they asked me to speak and asked me for a topic, I said that it was probably time I finally…
MediumCamille Fournier

Culture, People & Teams

Your team is not your first team
Whose side are you on?
High-Impact EngineeringRoman Nikolaev
Hiring Breakpoints
The most important factor to consider when expanding a team is that the usefulness of incremental hires is not linear. Here are the hiring breakpoints that matter.
Stay SaaSyStay SaaSy
Don’t Mistake Friendliness For Friendship
Being close to your team and being their manager are not the same, and the two run on different rules.
Thriving In EngineeringAlex Ponomarev
Healthy Feedback
A guide to exchanging criticism or praise in teams
martinfowler.comAnuja Karnik

Technology, Operations & Delivery

The Code Nobody Reads
Line-by-line review is going away. Whatever replaces it has to earn the trust reading used to provide.
ElevateAddy Osmani
Software quality is more than a testing problem
When software quality suffers, look at these underlying factors
Effective Engineering LeadersJames Samuel
AI and Software Architecture
Software Architecture is highly contextual.
Engineering StrategyAleix Morgadas
RDEL #163: How do AI coding assistants change the shape of engineering work over time?
Perceived productivity held at 84% for six months, while the share of engineers reporting a worse developer experience nearly doubled from 14% to 27%.
Research-Driven Engineering LeadershipResearch-Driven Engineering Leadership

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

“I’m burned out. What do I do about it?”
I don’t have all the answers, but I have thoughts, and they involve plants
The Whole LeaderTheresa Aristarco
What is trust?
Trust is what happens when people know what you’re going to do next
michaelheap.com
The Future-Self Fallacy • 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

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

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Have an amazing week!

Andy

Published by:

Andy Skipper