🧟‍♂️ Zombie Processes, Bad Decisions, Slow OKRs, Behavioural Interviews, Goldilocks Zone, Sleep vs Creativity: TMW #397

Hello, hello, hello! It's Monday, welcome to the week

Last week we asked readers about the level of autonomy they have around the technology budget and financial decision making - the picture is a fairly positive one, with almost 60% of respondents reporting that they have either complete or significant control:

If you're one of those that do have significant or complete control over the budget, I'd love to know:
1. What processes and tools do you use for managing the budget and resource plan in your team?
2. What advice would you give a new leader on how to manage budget within their team?
3. What approaches have you found successful in asking for and negotiating the size of your budget?
4. Have you always had significant control, or did you have to argue for it? What was your approach?

Answers on a postcard please! (Or just reply to this email) We'll be asking the Slack community this week as well, so watch out next week for some insights.

Don't forget: we're now in the final couple of weeks before our first non-UK CTO Craft Con event in Berlin, and there are still a few tickets still available. If you'd like to join us, meet other members and subscribers, see some fantastic talks and enjoy Germany's capital city, check out the link in the Events section below.

That's it, on with the links! See you next Monday

Andy @ CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

TBM 309: Zombie Practices and Processes

If all of this is true, why do companies have so many challenges with OKRs? Why do they treat them as yet another zombie process that no one particularly believes in or thinks about, yet continue “checking the box” quarter after quarter?

The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler

When Leaders Double Down on Bad Decisions

Admitting you’re wrong as a leader is difficult, but refusing to leads to costly organizational mistakes

Demystifying Culture with Gustavo RazzettiGustavo Razzetti

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Changing Gears: Navigating the Road to Executive Tech Leadership

Two years in feels like a good moment to reflect on the journey so far and the road ahead. Just after my 1-year on post, things escalated as I became Head of Engineering and joined the Senior Leade…

Olly BrandOlly Brand

How to track slow-moving OKRs

One of the hardest challenges when setting goals is to find good ways to measure things that move slowly.

TabilitySten

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

How to Lead Your Team when the House Is on Fire

Wartime can be extremely demanding for Engineering Managers. But by ruthlessly focusing on delivery, building a resilient team, investing in individuals, and maintaining their own strength, an EM can lead their people to not just survive but thrive under pressure.

Péter SzászPéter Szász

Inside RevenueCat’s engineering strategy: Scaling beyond 32,000+ apps

How RevenueCat Engineering powers 32,000+ apps with a focus on reliability, smart strategies, and building software that developers love.

Miguel Carranza

Culture, People & Teams

State vs Step Change – The individual inside culture

Protect yourself from the end of the world

Deeper Change - By Simon PowersSimon Powers

Emergence, and Team Dynamics

How understanding the concept of emergence helps when leading teams

Human-Centric EngineeringJohn Durrant

Intimidating Questions: How Bad Questions Shut People Down

Great questions can inspire and engage. AND, avoid these intimidating questions to nurture innovation and develop confidence and competence.

Let's Grow LeadersKarin Hurt

Common Behavioral Interview Questions For Big Tech

Dev Leader Weekly 60

Dev Leader WeeklyDev Leader

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 Bytes: FinOps - Your Unexpected Profitability Ally

Discover FinOps, a key methodology in tech, and learn how it addresses financial management amid macro-economic challenges.

CTO Craft

Check out all of our upcoming Mixer events, including events in Manchester and Gdansk in the coming weeks - is there one happening in your city soon?

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Unlocking the Power of Data with AI

A Game-Changer for Businesses

MediumQuentin Reul, Ph.D.

Predicting the Future of Distributed Systems

There are significant changes happening in distributed systems.

Colin BreckColin Breck

Finding the Goldilocks Zone: Just the right amount of process

All the struggling organizations I have worked in shared one common characteristic. They had process deficiencies: some did too little, while some did too much. The best-performing orgs? They did j…

CodeKraftAbdulFattaah Popoola

Clutch | The Map is Not The Territory: Transcending Fixed Security Landscapes

In the realm of Non-Human Identities (NHIs), relying solely on environment-specific security can create a false sense of safety. Discover why an identity-centric approach is essential for securing NHIs across the interconnected cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments.

ClutchTom Sadon

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

The Sleep-Creativity Cycle • Ness Labs

Not sleeping enough comes at a cost to productivity and creativity. Improve your sleep-creativity cycle to be more productive and creative.

Ness LabsAnne-Laure Le Cunff

Loneliness at work might have a simple solution

I know what you missed this summer... all the best workplace insight

Make Work BetterBruce Daisley

The benefits of a bucket list

Life’s too short not to have dreams. It doesn’t matter if they are big, small, expensive or cheap, the important thing is to try to make them happen.

Management-Issues.comIan Child

We’ve Got Depression All Wrong. It’s Trying to Save Us.

Common wisdom says depression starts in the mind with distorted thinking. But newer models suggest depression starts when the body initiates a defense strategy to help us survive.

Psychology TodayAlison Escalante M.D.

From our Sponsors

Identifying & Developing Future Engineering Leaders

Albany Growth finds talent for product and engineering teams.

Here we share takeaways from the recent Bytes with Albany’s Niruban Retnanandam and Planday CTO Sasha Bilton.

Check it out

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, Damilah, DoIT, Google Cloud, Jellyfish, Plandek, Skiller Whale, Softwire, Sema, Uplevel, Vention, YLD

If you're interested in sponsoring TMW or any of our events, drop us a line at partners@ctocraft.com.

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