🧠 Conference Time! Forgren's SPACE, Burnout, Groupthink, Goals, OODA, OKRs vs JTBD, DevSecOps: TMW #207 by CTO Craft

Hello there!

Well, the time has come - CTO Craft Con: The Delivery One begins this Tuesday at 4pm, and we couldn't be more excited. The last 12 months have brought a new focus on delivery, productivity, process and continuous improvement, and we're delighted to have some of the world's biggest experts in those areas joining us, along with CTOs from some of the biggest technology companies in the world giving their first-hand experience of getting work done.

To celebrate, we chatted with three of the biggest names in the line-up to get their views on bringing products to market, the best reading material for delivery managers, problem solving delivery, building predictability and much more. There's gold in these - well worth adding to your reading list!

Don’t forget, all Tech Manager Weekly readers have a £15 discount code - togetherORDERLYgold. Make sure you enter it in the promo code section when purchasing your tickets. Drop us a line if you have any problems at all

Until next time - see you on the other side!

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Con: The Delivery One - A Conference for CTOs, Curated by CTOs

Join our Virtual Conference on Delivery, Process and Metrics, with speakers from Intercom, Puppet, Etsy, Auth0 and more, talking about process, planning, metrics, agile, releases and more

CTO Craft Con: Spotlight Q&As

Spotlight Q&A with Code Climate's CEO and Co-founder, Bryan Helmkamp | CTO Craft

CEO and Co-founder of Code Climate, Bryan Helmkamp, discusses why OKRs are the key to team alignment and his tips for effective planning.

Spotlight Q&A with Karat's Shannon Hogue | CTO Craft

Karat's Shannon Hogue talks about diversity in hiring, supporting remote teams and why delivery must involve monitoring everything.

Spotlight Q&A with Executive Advisor and CTO x CPO, Han-Shen Yuan | CTO Craft

Han-Shen Yuan shares his thoughts on honesty within delivery and why the future of technology is still looking bright.

Reads of the Week

The SPACE of Developer Productivity

Developer productivity has been studied extensively. Unfortunately, after decades of research and practical development experience, knowing how to measure productivity or even define developer productivity has remained elusive, while myths about the topic are common. Far too often teams or managers attempt to measure developer productivity with simple metrics, attempting to capture it all with "one metric that matters."

Finance for non-finance directors: Part 1

A couple of years ago I got some excellent training on finance from a finance director at the FT. At the end of last year I went on a longer, more intensive course from the IoD, aimed at non-finance directors, and I learned LOADS.

About our Partners

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

AWS, CircleCI, Indiespring, LinearB, Honeycomb, 101 Ways, Albany Partners, YLD, iTechArt, Wynter, The Scale Factory, PGS and Skiller Whale

🥝 🥝  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

How to Measure Burnout Accurately and Ethically

The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is the first scientifically developed measure of burnout and is used widely in research studies around the world. Since its first publication in 1981, the MBI has been applied for other purposes, such as individual diagnosis or organizational metrics.

Short Fat Engineers Are Undervalued

Professionals supposedly come in two shapes: either short and fat, or tall and skinny, meaning their skill set is either broad or deep. They can also be T-shaped—knowing a lot about a little and a little about a lot—but in this metaphor, that’s a compromise.

Groupthink — Recognizing It In Teams and Organizations

Space flight is inherently dangerous. They strap you to a rocket moving at 18,000 miles per hour, which sounds crazy. But insane or not, we don’t have to be stupid about it. Many of us are familiar with the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

Healthy Goals

Without goals, no one will do anything! There's no accountability on the team. People don't take their commitments seriously. They give me silly excuses. Whenever I turn around, they are chatting on Slack or on Reddit. I'm not sure what they do all day. It feels like we are going in circles.

CTO Craft Con: The Delivery One - A Conference for CTOs, Curated by CTOs

Join our Virtual Conference on Delivery, Process and Metrics, with speakers from Intercom, Puppet, Etsy, Auth0 and more, talking about process, planning, metrics, agile, releases and more

Leadership & Self-management

The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

The OODA Loop is a four-step process for making effective decisions in high-stakes situations. It involves collecting relevant information, recognizing potential biases, deciding, and acting, then repeating the process with new information. Read on to learn how to use the OODA Loop.

The 5 Common Mistakes Of New Engineering Managers

Starting in a new role as a fresh engineering manager is not easy. Suddenly you need very different skills, feedback loops seem insanely long and the sense of accomplishment and success starts fading as a result. Earlier I wrote about 4 key ways even experienced engineering managers fail.

How to keep your job as CTO

If you are a CTO, you need to see yourself as an executive. If you don’t, you will be fired. In this blog, I give advice I failed to follow at the beginning of my career. It is advice, once followed, that propelled me to the top.

What Shape are You?

If you're going to manage people, you're going to have a lot of conversations about employee performance. It's just bound to happen. Sometimes, like during reviews, it might seem excessive. You might wonder if's worth all the time it takes. It is.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Do OKRs work with Jobs to Be Done?

As I’ve written about extensively, Objectives and Key Results work best when they focus on changing human behavior. As the popularity of this method skyrockets, teams are working to integrate OKR with the other methods they use regularly.

Without These 3 Things, You Don’t Have DevSecOps

DevSecOps adds security to the DevOps software development and releasing paradigm. Everyone thinks this is a great idea, except actual Dev and Ops practitioners, for whom security can be a thankless, stressful time sink.

CUPID – the back story

Andy says: "Daniel is speaking at CTO Craft Con! Looking forward to it"

At a recent Extreme Tuesday Club (XTC) virtual meet-up, we were discussing whether the SOLID principles are outdated. A while ago I gave a tongue-in-cheek talk on the topic, so ahead of the meet-up one of the organisers asked what principles I would replace SOLID with since I disagreed with them.

CTO Craft Con: The Delivery One - A Conference for CTOs, Curated by CTOs

Join our Virtual Conference on Delivery, Process and Metrics, with speakers from Intercom, Puppet, Etsy, Auth0 and more, talking about process, planning, metrics, agile, releases and more

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:

http://www.techmanagerweekly.com

Have an amazing week!

Andy