👩🏽💻 Women in Tech, Paradoxical Feedback, Storytelling, Becoming an Agile Coach, Energy Efficient Coding: TMW #129
Howdy, welcome to the week!
A quick reminder - there are some London-based Tech Lead Dinners planned for April and May, for different team sizes. If you'd like to go along, use the link below for your team size, and if you'd like to know more, reply to this email and I'll put you in touch with Hywel, who'll be running the events:
Growing teams on 17 April
Two-tier teams on 24 April
Early-stage teams on 1 May
You may remember we gathered lots of data on CTOs from around the world earlier in the year - don't worry, we haven't forgotten about that, and the results are being pulled together to be published in a blog post (or two!) over the next couple of weeks. Keep your eyes peeled!
Andy
Read of the Week
2019 HackerRank Women in Tech Report
From the newest discoveries in medicine to the latest advances in renewable energy, software is touching every aspect of people's lives across the globe. Given this, it's vital that the creators of software are as diverse as the populations that will be affected by their work.
Culture & People
The Feedback Paradox: Brutal Honesty, Radical Transparency, Radical Candor and Netflix
Telling each other what we think is a deeply necessary part of being human. We depend on shared knowledge to live and work together. We are successful as a species because we form groups, share concepts with each other, align on them and act on our understanding.
Open-Plan Office: Great for Photo Shoots, Terrible for Collaboration
The open-plan office fad took off as a dream for a more collaborative and egalitarian workplace.
Coaching Tools – The Narrative
In my last article I talked about the importance of the one on one coaching sessions between a manager and her product manager. That technique is about providing an ongoing mechanism for helping the product manager to reach his or her potential.
The Essential Questions That Have Powered This Top Silicon Valley Manager’s Career
Julie Zhuo first started working at Facebook as an intern over a decade ago. Since then, she’s risen through the ranks to become VP of Product Design at the company, leading a team of hundreds that’s charged with designing the app billions of users see every day.
Leadership & Self-management
The Five Conditions for Improvement
Bob reports to you, and you notice Bob has some sort of performance problem that will need to be rectified, because long-term (which means anywhere from a month to a year), this problem will affect Bob’s chances of keeping this job.
Engineering Management Philosophies and Why They Matter Even if You Are Not a Manager
Annie is a software engineering manager leading a platform team within Square’s platform & infrastructure engineering organization. Prior to Square, she worked at a number of startups across a…
How to Deliver Constructive Feedback in Difficult Situations
“We are dangerous when we are not conscious of our responsibility for how we behave, think, and feel,”―Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication All my biggest regrets as a founder are around…
Agile, Engineering & Product
6 traits of highly effective agile software and product teams
Many executives, managers and professionals want to join the agile movement, considered the favored approach to software development as well as overall product development. At the same time, agile can't just be thrust on the organization with the expectation of overnight, collaborative results.
Cost vs Value Measurements for Agile Approaches
Some of my clients have struggled with their project governance as they move to agile approaches. In the past, they've asked for estimates and costs—by requirement—and then tracked the variance for those estimates and costs. The governance people do not record assumptions.
Agile won’t get you to Done; here are 4 ways to fix that
Last month, Jeff Gothelf and I were at Barcelona’s annual Llum festival, an amazing event that features light installations stretching across Barcelona’s Poblenou neighborhood. Some of the installations were breathtaking. Others were downright baffling.
Lessons from a Personal Journey in Becoming an Agile Coach with Shane Hastie
At the start of March, we welcomed Shane Hastie; Director of Agile Learning Programs at ICAgile and InfoQ Culture Podcast host, to the AWA Meetup.
What else?
Your Brain Needs 1.5 MB of Storage to Master Your Native Language
At one point we were all babbling babies, our brains producing sounds no more complicated than adorable "ahs" and "coos." But during our early explorations, we began internalizing words and they soon began to have meaning.
Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity?
Can energy usage data tell us anything about the quality of our programming languages? Last year a team of six researchers in Portugal from three different universities decided to investigate this question, ultimately releasing a paper titled “Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages.
That’s it!
If you’d like to be considered for the CTO Craft Community, fill in your details here, and we’ll be in touch!
https://ctocraft.typeform.com/to/XXRNqV
Can you help spread the word?
Please do remember to share this link if you know of anyone who’d like to receive TMW:
http://www.techmanagerweekly.com
Have an amazing week!
Andy @ CTO Craft
