🎪 CTO Craft Con opens today! Everyday Strategy, Writing Culture, Repetition, Tension, Kolb, Dysfunction Mapping: TMW #306 by CTO Craft
Hello there! Welcome to the week!
And... Welcome to day 1 of CTO Craft Con Winter 2022! Doors to the conference platform are already open for networking, and we'll be starting the first set of keynotes and talks at 2pm UK time.
There's still time to grab a ticket, so jump in - we'd love to see you there!
We're also still collecting Calls for Papers for the Lightning Talks on day 3, so if you're keen to get involved, drop your details in the form. on the link below.
On with the show! See you later
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Con Winter 2022 - A Conference for CTOs, by CTOs
Grab a front-row seat to the most in-depth discussions of what it means to be a senior leader in a technology organisation, how to build a solid foundation with other C-level leaders, how to ensure alignment between engineering and other functions and how to keep you and your team’s skills sharp. November 14 - 16 2022
It’s Your Turn: We Want Your Lightning Talk Call for Papers Now! | CTO Craft
Call for Papers submissions are open for Lightning Talks on day 3 of the CTO Craft Winter Conference NOW.
Reads of the Week
Demystifying strategic leadership: How to lead strategically every day
Start every work day with 15 minutes of strategy time (put it into your calendar now). It’s 15 mins because everyone can make 15 minutes. I’ve done this with the busiest CEOs to engineers - they all managed to make the time.
From our Sponsors
Winning over the Board: The Data and Slides that Communicate Engineering Health - from LinearB
LinearB's CTO walks through the data and slides he uses in the boardroom to relate engineering health to business outcomes.
Free report: The Future of Security - from O'Reilly
This O’Reilly report explores significant emerging cybersecurity trends to help you stay a step ahead of an ever-changing array of malicious actors. And did we mention it’s free?
About our Sponsors
Thanks as always to the amazing sponsors helping CTO Craft bring you resources like this newsletter, our events, community and more:
AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Google Cloud, iTechArt, Jellyfish, LinearB, Lohika, 101 Ways, O’Reilly, PGS Software, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, Swarmia, YLD
Culture & People
Why can't we all just get along? - Emily Webber
I’ve noticed an increasingly worrying trend in the industry of focus on specialisms at the expense of collaboration, shared responsibility and valuable outcomes. There might be many reasons for this, from organisational structures, changing workforces or uncertainty in the world. However, this trend can create silos across departments, between roles, and even in teams.
How writing culture helps Loom operate with autonomy and clarity
Leading with transparency is a core tenet of Loom's organizational philosophy. While defining a new category of async communication with video messaging, Loom still regards written documentation as a great way to empower their employees to function more autonomously.
Tension
This article describes the simple language I use to describe product development: opportunity, output, outcome, and impact. But more importantly it describes the tensions and unexpected implications in the model: If you understand all that stuff, then, there’s no need to read the article.
The flying wedge.
When I worked at Yahoo!, our team needed another engineering manager. We didn’t run a hiring process, or even do interviews. Instead, our Director brought on a colleague he’d worked with before. That new manager soon decided he needed a tech lead on his team.
Leadership & Self-management
The Power of Repetition: the Secret of Successful Leaders
It’s an innocent sounding thought, but it’s a dangerous one for any leader that wants to be truly effective. The power of repetition is any leader’s best friend.
OKR Anti-pattern: Using measures of system behavior
As we’ve discussed multiple times here, your key results should be outcomes. Outcomes are measures of human behavior that deliver business value. This is what sets OKR’s apart from other goal-setting frameworks. We’re no longer managing to features, or output.
Using Forcing Functions to Build New Habits
I consider myself an Olympic flosser, but more than one dentist over the past five years has told me I have a problem. They keep referring to it as “bone loss,” which they said over time can lead to gum disease.
David Kolb’s Learning Cycle with Coaching Questions to Reflect
In this article, I explain Kolb’s model of reflection and share a list of coaching questions to reflect upon. I use this model in my coaching practice to create space for clients to enable learning and insights between the coaching sessions.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Dysfunction Mapping; A tool for effective Agile Coaching
Scrum Mastery and Agile coaching can sometimes feel like an incredibly opaque trade. Everyone loves to talk about mindset and servant leadership, but very few people talk about what they actually do all day.
Bottleneck: Product v Engineering
The key to any successful startup is close collaboration between product and engineering. This sounds easy, but can be incredibly difficult. Both groups may have conflicting goals and different definitions of success that have to be reconciled.
On Accountability in Software Development
All businesses want accountability. It is part of making anything work. If you need to achieve results, you need to deliver something, and it would be great to know when it’s going to happen. Accountability is still a hard word for software teams though.
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