🍉 Conference Agenda, DST, Job Descriptions, Negotiation, Emotional Extremes, Junior Developers: TMW #238 by CTO Craft

Howdy!

In case you missed it, we announced the (almost) full line up and agenda for CTO Craft Con last week - if you've been holding off on buying your ticket until there's more to see, now is your chance, and don't forget to use your Member discount using the code frl2rostuchoz7yot61c. We'll be joined by Cal Henderson of Slack, Simon Wardley of Wardley Maps, Serena Deckelmann of Firefox, Erica Lockheimer of Linkedin and dozens of others over the course of four days.

With the help of the CTO Craft Slack community, the topics for the four panels during the conference have now been chosen:

• Interviewing Best Practices
• Developing ICs into Leaders
• OKRs and KPIs for Alignment
• Supporting Exhausted Teams

Only three weeks to go!

To coincide with the agenda announcement,  we thought you'd like to meet some of our keynote speakers. Our amazing editor Rach sat down with Mike Boufford, CTO of Greenhouse, and Claire Russell, CEO of Mental Health in Business to learn more about their work and how the pandemic has affected them. Take a look at the links below!

See you next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Con 3.0 - Unmissable Insights from Engineering Leaders

Join us for the third CTO Craft Conference to share stories, case studies and best practices on four key topics: Hiring, Learning & Development, Strategy, plus Burnout & Stress in engineering teams and leaders. For CTOs, by CTOs.

From the CTO Craft Blog

Three Tips to Effectively Scale Your Hiring Process

Zego's award-winning Engineering Manager, Phillipa Rodney shares her insider tips on how to refine your hiring processes ready for scaling

Spotlight Q&A with Claire Russell - CEO of Mental Health in Business

Claire Russell, CEO of Mental Health in Business shares her thoughts on creating a culture of honesty, openness and having each other's backs

Spotlight Q&A with Greenhouse's Mike Boufford

CTO of Greenhouse, Mike Boufford shares his insights on refining recruitment processes and doing his bit to increase diversity in tech

Reads of the Week

The Largely Untold Story Of How One Guy In California Keeps The World’s Computers Running On The Right Time Zone. (Well, Sort Of)

Down the rabbit hole: my brief odyssey into the esoteric world of the tight-knit time zone data maintenance community who quietly keep the world’s computers from avoiding DST-related-meltdowns

About our Partners

You’re invited: Innovate through Data Virtual Summit - from Logi Analytics

Logi Spark 2021 - October 19 & 20: At this free virtual event, your team will learn practical tips from the pros to help turn your product roadmap into a reality and generate value for your end users. Register now to join other data leaders looking to transform the world of analytics.

A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2021 - you’re all amazing!

AWS, CircleCI, Karat, O’Reilly, Indiespring, Skiller Whale, The Software House, iTechArt, LinearB, PGS Software, 101 Ways, Albany Partners, Swarmia

🥝 🥝  If you’re interested in reaching thousands of senior technology leaders and decision makers, drop a reply to this email to see our Partnership Opportunities! 🥝 🥝

Culture & People

My team is going in circles. Help!

This post originally appeared in my newsletter. Subscribe to receive it! “Lara, I’m a manager, and my team is kind of going in circles.

How to write good job descriptions

We’ve been doing a lot of hiring at interviewing.io recently, which means we’ve been writing a lot of job descriptions.

Book review: Never Split The Difference

Negotiation is an often undervalued skill for product managers. Whether we want to get budget to go after a specific market opportunity or need to push back on a specific request, we need to be strong negotiators to navigate certain scenarios effectively.

You must not measure individual software engineer performance

It is very difficult to explain the nature of software engineering work to stakeholders who don’t work in engineering. We compensate salespeople, for example, partly with commissions that reflect their individual performance.

Why nobody hires junior developers and what happens next

While the number of job opportunities for software developer skyrockets together with salaries all around the world, fresh grads and junior developers struggle to even get invited for the interviews. Why does it happen and can we do anything about it?

CTO Craft Con 3.0 - Unmissable Insights from Engineering Leaders

Join us for the third CTO Craft Conference to share stories, case studies and best practices on four key topics: Hiring, Learning & Development, Strategy, plus Burnout & Stress in engineering teams and leaders. For CTOs, by CTOs.

Leadership & Self-management

3 Ways To Avoid The Leadership Chaos Found In The Emotional Extremes

When you are experiencing any strong emotions, you are not at your leadership best. Your best leadership will always flow when you avoid the emotional extremes.

Planning work with OKRs

Here’s a fascinating challenge that happens once your teams start targeting outcomes rather than outputs with their OKR goals: planning work becomes unpredictable. Why fascinating as opposed to terrifying? Because unpredictability is the true nature of modern software-based products and services.

The weight of the world: Taking care of yourself as a leader when the pressure’s on

Right now, your shoulders are probably feeling a bit heavy. No wonder.

The Integrator Burden

Does your role involve being an "integrator" across teams? Supporting. Connecting. Cohering. Resolving. Balancing. Listening. Translating. Absorbing.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Product, Domain, and Team Architecture Overview Template

I’m looking at this challenge from multiple angles, and one of them is figuring out the key information I need. If I can capture key information earlier, that gives me a good understanding of key elements of the business’s architecture, we can get to valuable conversations sooner.

Bugs and Debt in the Product Flow

Bugs are a fact of every product’s life. You have to allot a certain amount of time to paying down tech debt, or else it becomes way too hairy and eventually you end up having to just refactor your codebase. And no one likes a refactor.

Our approach to building transparent and explainable AI systems

Co-authors: Parvez Ahammad, Kinjal Basu, Yazhou Cao, Shaunak Chatterjee, David Durfee, Sakshi Jain, Nihar Mehta, Varun Mithal, and Jilei Yang Delivering the best member and customer experiences with a focus on trust is core to everything that we do at LinkedIn.

CTO Craft Con 3.0 - Unmissable Insights from Engineering Leaders

Join us for the third CTO Craft Conference to share stories, case studies and best practices on four key topics: Hiring, Learning & Development, Strategy, plus Burnout & Stress in engineering teams and leaders. For CTOs, by CTOs.

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