🍱 CTO Strategy, Overcomplicating It, Candidate Values, Descaling Scrum, STAR, RFC Templates: TMW #272 by CTO Craft
Hello again! Hope you've had a good weekend
Last week, the whole CTO Craft team descended on Shoreditch, London for our first face-to-face Team Summit - alongside running through how CTO Craft looks today and welcoming some new faces to the team, we began work on the next phase... There's some exciting stuff coming up - watch this space..
Our team of CTO coaches continues to grow, and we've updated the website with the latest additions - we'd love to introduce some of them, so check out the blog post below to see who's who.
Next week sees the start of our 16th Mentoring Circle - we're now providing hundreds of leaders with a safe space to talk about challenges they're facing, topics they're hoping to spread among their teams, a support structure for the most difficult times and ongoing learning and support. If you're interested in learning more about what we do and how it helps, click the button below
Until we meet again
Andy @ CTO Craft
We're Proud to Introduce our Amazing CTO Craft Coaches: Part 1
The CTO Craft coach group continues to grow to help you develop your career and progress through the everyday challenges of working in tech. Meet some of the amazing coaches we're working with.
CTO Craft Bytes
CTO Fundamentals - CTO Strategy, Fri 1 Jul 2022 at 12:30pm BST
In a world where business is happening anyway and where culture eats strategy for breakfast, why should we even bother talking about a CTO strategy? And how is that any different from the overall company strategy? How could a strategist CTO play a role in making a real difference?
Reads of the Week
Stop Overcomplicating It: The Simple Guidebook to Upping Your Management Game
Russ Laraway wades through all of the competing opinions, complex frameworks and advice out there on how to be a better manager, creating a simple, data-backed leadership toolkit.
Our new Candidate Values Report: What turns candidates off?
What do your candidates value? It’s a question that HR and Talent Acquisition teams have brainstormed in countless meetings, trying to understand what candidates value, besides compensation and benefits.
From our Sponsors
Benefits of Cloud Computing in Financial Services - from iTechArt
For years, consumers bore the lack of tech found at traditional banks. The shift to cloud computing is now a competitive necessity.
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, CircleCI, Code Climate, O’Reilly, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, The Software House, iTechArt, LinearB, Lohika, Albany Partners, 101 Ways, PGS Software, YLD, Steamhaus, Swarmia
Culture & People
What we learned from descaling 25 Scrum teams
What happens when you descale? We learned that some additional roles and events are needed to address cross-team and cross-organizational alignment and prioritization, when our organization went from a ‘Spotify-inspired” setup to a descaled setup with 25 stand-alone autonomous Scrum teams.
4 Tips for Choosing Job Levels when Headcount Planning
We have new headcount for your teams! What job levels do you want? There’s no easy answer to this request. We’d love to hire experienced employees, but they’re expensive and take forever to find. Junior people are faster to hire but have a longer training period.
STAR method for interview questions.
Fork this template! A few weeks ago my learning circle started working through each others’ career checkups. Following that, a few folks started talking about framing their experience effectively in interviews.
Keep Your Team Highly Engaged and High Performing with this One Key Idea
I recently shared some news that was very exciting for me. A bit of a milestone that I achieved, which was to gain my CSP. This is a Certified Speaking Professional. The highest accreditation globally within the professional speaking industry.
Leadership & Self-management
Limiting Work In Progress as a Manager
The demands on a manager’s time are endless and sometimes it feels like you’re being pulled in every direction at once. These demands can make it hard to focus, they make it hard to move from reacting to problems to anticipating them.
4 great questions to help with your decision-making
Not long ago, I was coaching a leader who was faced with a big decision he had to make. The decision had huge implications not only for the organisation – but also, if he was honest, for himself. The stakes were high. The pressure palpable. And he was in a pickle. Stucksville.
The 7 roles of a CTO
This post is about me figuring out what a CTO does. I tried to be methodical and deep about it, and broke it down to a few different aspects. The first month was ideation. The second and third months were getting funded and opening a bank account. Months 4-9 were hiring and team building.
3 Crucial Qualities Good Leaders Cultivate in their Team Members
Leadership is a balance between business intelligence and emotional intelligence. A good leader understands that the organization is a business. And the life-blood of the organization is its team members.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022
In May 2022 over 70,000 developers told us how they learn and level up, which tools they’re using, and what they want.
Software Engineering RFC and Design Doc Templates
RFCs - request for comment - also called Design Docs are a common tool that engineering teams use to build software faster, by clarifying assumptions and circulating plans earlier.
8 Must-Have Project Reports You Can Use Today
Project reports are extremely valuable. Some even say they're indispensable, which is what makes them so important to have in your toolbox. Read more here. Knowing exactly what state your project is in is important.
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