🎟 Conference Speakers! Engineering All-Hands, Hospitality, Productive Conflict, Harmful Goals, Data Engineering: TMW #291 by CTO Craft
Hello there!
You'll have noticed that this week's first TMW has landed in your inbox on a Tuesday rather than the usual Monday morning - we decided to pause all comms yesterday as a mark of respect during the funeral of HRH Queen Elizabeth II.
But - we're back with some huge announcements this week! We're now able to tell you all about the incredible line-up we have planned for CTO Craft Con Winter 2022. The schedule is now complete for days 1 and 2, and we're beginning to draw up the third day, which is an Unconference, where you can volunteer to give a lightning talk on subjects that interest you. Drop me a reply if you'd like to know more about the Unconference - we'd love to hear from you.
In the line-up we have some amazing people like Jody Bailey, CTO at Stack Overflow, Robin Sutara, CTO at Databricks, Smruti Patel, HoE at Stripe, Maria Gutierrez, VPE at Twitter, Heidi Helfand, author of Dynamic Reteaming, Adam Witwer, CPO at O'Reilly Media and dozens more. Check out the website below to see the full agenda and grab your ticket - remember, if you're a CTO Craft Slack member, check there for a members' discount code.
See you there - on with the content!
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Bytes
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Culture & People
How We Run Engineering All-Hands at Storyblocks
Bringing your entire engineering team together for an all-hands meeting may be the most expensive meeting your organization has. This is the meeting that matters.
Cultivating Hospitality
Companies love to talk about their culture and how it's unique or why it's special. People love to talk about why they think it was this way or that way, or why things changed. But something that is always challenging (and increasingly so in a remote world) is how to cultivate the values your company holds as you grow.
The Systems within a Software Team
I’ve been discussing how to apply Systems Thinking in engineering leadership and how understanding the systems and processes involving your team is the best way to get good results, both for the team and the people within it. However, that is relatively abstract.
7 Tips to Create a Culture of Productive Conflict
Conflict happens all the time. What happens after conflict begins is the result of leadership. A good leader can redirect and manage conflict to be productive; a poor leader, well, might just create more conflict.
Leadership & Self-management
4 Techniques for Managing Your Time and Cognitive Load as a Senior Leader
Most of the senior leaders in any sizable company jump around slots of 30 min to few-hour meetings on a good day. That can range from meeting with customers, team reviews, re-occurring tactical meetings, 1:1s, or tech architecture.
Applying Mental Models to Building Digital Products
As the singularly focused business development person at Simple Thread, I greatly admire the work of the researchers, designers, and engineers I get to work with every day. But with my skills I am always the generalist in the room.
Why Goal Cascades are Harmful (and What to Do Instead)
A company sets 24 ambitious goals for the year. They do not consider the org chart at all when creating the goals. The goals are completely department/team agnostic. The goals are solution-agnostic (e.g. increase _______).
Write Simply, Change Effectively
One of my coaching clients, a Head of Engineering at his company, has been dealing with a small “re-org”. While supporting him, I again realized how organizational change is difficult but also how leaders are often concerned that it will rattle their people and affect their motivation.
Agile, Engineering & Product
What is Data Engineering?
I’m hearing more about data engineering. As a software engineer, why is it important, what’s worth knowing about this field, and could it be worth transitioning into this area?
Up and down the abstraction hierarchy
As operators, when the system we operate is working properly, we use a functional description of the system to reason about its behavior. Here’s an example, taken from my work on a delivery system.
Moving house is like building software
I’ve not written for a few weeks because we’ve been busy moving house. In an attempt to turn my brain away from the lure of unpacking more boxes and moving more furniture around, here I am in front of the keyboard for a short while.
How Steve Sasson Invented the Digital Camera
Steve Sasson is an electrical engineer who invented the digital camera while working for Kodak.
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:
Have an amazing week!
Andy