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🦩 Leadership Grit, Making Decisions, Goal Setting, Trust, Career Conversations, Sprint Capacity, Sharding: TMW #387

How are you using GenAI tools? We want to know...
🛩️
Thanks to YLD for sponsoring this issue of Tech Manager Weekly - a software engineering and design consultancy, helping your team succeed by fostering a progressive culture of learning.

Hello again! It's Monday!

Everyone's talking about GenAI and making some big claims - but how is it actually being used? What decisions are you and your team making about it? What part - if any - is it playing in your day to day work?

Last week, in partnership with Softwire, we launched a brand new survey to find out more about how you're using AI, the benefits you've realised, and the pitfalls you've identified. Your experiences can help shape our understanding of this crucial tool and cut through the hype - share your thoughts here:

CTO Craft: Generative AI
CTO Craft alongside Softwire are conducting a survey on Generative AI and its impact on you and your business.

Thanks in advance - your views are so important to us!

On with the links... See you next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

PS: If you know anyone who'd benefit from getting a huge batch of reading material in their inbox every week, please do point them at TechManagerWeekly.com!

CTO Craft Events

CTO Craft Con: Berlin | 24th - 25th September 2024
CTO Craft Con will bring together Chief Technology Officers and other senior technology leaders from the most exciting start-ups, scale-ups, unicorns, and big tech companies to elevate their engineering culture.
CTO Craft Con: Berlin 2024
CTO Craft Roundtables: London
Welcome to the launch of our newest event: CTO Craft Roundtables! Join us for a half-day of engaging discussions and networking opportunities designed specifically for CTOs and engineering leaders
CTO Craft Con London 2024pipctocraft
CTO Craft Mixers - meet other technology leaders in your area
Join CTOs and other tech leaders in your city at our informal drinks and networking events, get feedback on ideas and make life-long connections.
CTO Craft Con London 2024

Reads of the Week

Document your product and software architecture decisions.
Hint: If you document your decisions, your future self will thank you!
DomainAnalysis.ioIndu Alagarsamy
How to make quality decisions quickly - Work Life by Atlassian
stop deciding by committee and make the call
Work Life by AtlassianDr. Molly Sands

From our Sponsors

From YLD: Leveraging GenAI for strategic business advantage: opportunities and considerations

Many CTOs struggle to present AI plans due to a lack of clear implementation frameworks. Julie-Laure Mikulskis, YLD’s Head of Technology, explains how GenAI can generate business value and help leaders in strategic planning.

Download the ebook

A huge thanks to all our sponsors and partners, who make Tech Manager Weekly and the CTO Craft community possible:

AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Coherence, HeadChannel, Google Cloud, Jellyfish, Polly, Skiller Whale, Softwire, Sema, Unblocked, Uplevel, Vention, YLD, 101 Ways

If you're interested in sponsoring TMW or any of our events, drop a reply to this email.

Leadership, Strategy & Business

CTO Agenda
Many tech leaders tell me they feel adrift. Instead of deciding where they’d like to go today, they are shoved here and there based on whatever issues the day brings. In what feels like a nod to Do…
Aviv Ben-Yosef
Goal Crafting
Goal crafting is one of the most essential leadership activities. Organizational performance and team growth depend on well-crafted goals. Without a good goal-crafting exercise, your teams may focus on what is in front of their noses, solving what seems quickly solvable. Good goal crafting forces you not to ignore or postpone problems that require new ways of thinking, collaboration, or hardships. Without a good goal-crafting exercise, you can get stuck in the status quo or focus on what matters to you or your opinions, not what your stakeholders might need.
Rumors of the Death of Software are Greatly Exaggerated
One of the topics we talked about at our LP day in Paris a couple of weeks ago was: Is SaaS dying? This was before this post about “The End…
Point Nine LandChristoph Janz
TBM 296: Trust Lets You Observe Reality
Somewhere in your organization, you have a completely well-meaning, qualified, empathetic executive—maybe the CEO, perhaps the CFO, someone—screaming (quietly) to themselves, “What the hell is going on?” It’s obvious something is wrong—to everyone—but no one can seem to give them a straight answer on what it is (though everyone has a multitude of theories). And when that executive asks for someone, anyone, to take some sort of accountability for the state of things, they get bombarded with self-serving theories and hand-waving.
The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler

Culture, People & Teams

Deltas to the Global Maxima: Better Career Conversations - The Engineering Manager
Focussing on the next promotion can be myopic. How do we coach our reports to the global maxima of their careers?
The Engineering ManagerJames Stanier
Are 1:1s Worth The Time?
An exploration of the pros and cons of 1:1 meetings
Fish Food for ThoughtMike Fisher
Peter Principle Explained | Management 3.0
The Peter Principle: Promoting individuals until incompetence. Learn its dangers and how to avoid it with Management 3.0 tools and practices.
Management 3.0nadine
Jade Rubick - Macho leadership and bro culture
We explore macho leadership and bro culture, how to identify and respond to them, the risks they pose, and techniques for navigating these environments.
LazywillEngineering Leadership Weekly

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Sprint Planning: Stop Wasting Time on Spreadsheet Capacity Micromanagement
Your Beautiful and Elaborate Sprint Planning Capacity Excel Spreadsheet IS the Problem
Maarten’s NewsletterMaarten Dalmijn
Introduction to Database Sharding
Use database sharding to improve the performance of your system
The Tech CollectiveSĂ©verin Bruhat
Planning fallacy - The Decision Lab
Planning Fallacy is the tendency to be too optimistic about one’s estimates. As a result, the time needed to get something done is underestimated.
The Decision LabDan Pilat
RDEL #48: What are the top technical debt strategies, processes, factors, and impact metrics?
This week, we dive into a review of dozens of papers to establish the most well-known strategies, processes, factors, and metrics used for technical debt management.
Research-Driven Engineering LeadershipLizzie Matusov

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Six Ways Leaders Can Develop Grit
What does a leader with grit look like? Here are six strategies to become a grittier leader with purpose, clarity and skill. Increase your leadership strength with learning ways to add grit to your toolbox. Angela Duckworth gives us insights into grit.
Terri Klass ConsultingTerri Klass
10 Ways You Can Spot Insecurity In Any Leader – Scott Cochrane
Scott Cochrane A Leader's JourneyScott Cochrane
The real job security these days is knowing you can get another job
Have you ever felt the ground of job security shift beneath your feet? You’re not alone! Here’s how to build your own safety net in tech.
Level up as a Tech LeadAnemari Fiser
We Can’t Solve Burnout Until We Agree That Work Isn’t Working
Burnout is now at the highest rate its ever been, with 82% of the global workforce feeling at risk of burnout.
ForbesLindsay Kohler

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!

https://ctocraft.com/community

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