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🐌 Decision-making Pitfalls, Lean Failure, Joyful Work, Team Conflict, Good Engineers, Architecture Proposals, Celebrating, Drama: TMW #403

Last chance for CfPs for London 2025!

Hello, hello, hello!

As 2024 races on, the line-up for CTO Craft Con: London 2025 is coming together at speed, and if you're looking to submit a talk, this is your last week to do so... Get in quick! We'll be bringing together our Creative Committee to run through submissions shortly, so please make your submission by the end of Friday (Oct 25th). Here's where to make your submission!

CTO Craft Con: London 2025
CTO Craft Con will bring together over 500 Chief Technology Officers and other senior technology leaders from the most exciting start-ups, scale-ups, unicorns, and big tech companies to elevate their engineering culture in London, March 2025.
CTO Craft Con London 2025

Hundreds and hundreds of TMW readers have already checked out the Spilling the AI Tea report - thanks again to all the leaders that took part in the survey, and giving us so much useful data to build our analysis of how teams are using AI, the productivity gains and losses, the risks and concerns they face, and a huge amount more. Do check it out if you haven't already!

That's it! On with the links - see you next week...

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Events

CTO Craft Bytes: The Glass Cliff Female and Minority CTOs Face in Companies
Explore optimising engineering performance with strategic metrics & GenAI. Discover practical tips to enhance productivity & drive success.
CTO Craft
CTO Craft Mixer: Dublin
Join our community of CTOs and senior tech leaders for another insightful and interactive meet-up in Dublin.
CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

Dear CTO: it’s not 2015 anymore
With AI and big tech layoffs, engineering organizations have been put under a microscope like never before. Engineering leaders need to adapt to this new normal.
The Godfrey BlogChristine Miao
Decision-Making Pitfalls for Technical Leaders
Tech’s favorite party trick is promoting programmers into leadership roles with zero coaching on how to make the transition, or even a briefing on what the role entails. The programmer accept

Chelsea TroyView all posts by Chelsea

Campus is a Year Old!

A huge thank you to everyone who has been part of this incredible journey so far, the thought leaders and course creators, the creative teams, and most of all, of the members who have taken part over the last year and given us the most valuable feedback - you're all amazing.

If you haven’t yet joined, it’s not too late to unlock your full engineering leadership potential. With expert-led courses, actionable insights, a vibrant private community, and performance assessments, Campus offers everything a technology leader needs to take their role to the next level. Let’s keep building the future, together. 

Join Campus today

Leadership, Strategy & Business

The Changing Engineering Landscape and How to Stay Ahead of It
Gen-Z, Remote vs Office, QA Shift-Left, and Fewer Engineering Managers
Practical Engineering ManagementMirek Stanek
Focusing Engineering Organizations
Many engineering organizations find it challenging to keep delivering value faster as they grow and mature. Some people take that for granted. I object. There are common pitfalls that we can learn 

Aviv Ben-Yosef
C-Suite Hiring: Seven Mistakes Companies Still Make
Standard methods for screening and selecting executive candidates aren’t effective at predicting superior performance.
MIT Sloan Management ReviewBarry Conchie and Sarah Dalton
Lean Failure Explained: When Command-and-Control Leadership Sabotages Success
How Often Does This Happen? It’s a story I’ve heard too many times. An organization spends years, even decades, entrenched in a top-down,
Lean BlogMark Graban

Culture, People & Teams

The ‘Joyful Work’ of Software Engineering
We rarely seem to talk about optimising for ‘joy’ in software engineering work. Why is it taboo?
Human-Centric EngineeringJohn Durrant
What Do I Look For When Hiring an Engineer?
Hei maailma!
It Depends / Nimble AutonomyKevin Goldsmith
Case Study: Remote Self-Selection at Viafree – Context specific...
Following the impact of COVID-19, and shifting consumer behaviors, Viafree, an ad-supported streaming service, saw a natural decline in usage. This, coupled with a strategic reprioritization within NENT (now Viaplay), meant that nearly all teams developing Viafree would be disbanded. The

Context specific agile, product, and systems coachingViktor Cessan
Collaboration Strategies for Managing Team Conflict
Transform team chaos into collaboration with strategies for managing team conflict and boosting performance.
Soren Kaplan - Author of Experiential IntelligenceInspiring stories and practical tools for individuals, teams, & organizations.

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
How AI Could Transform the World for the Better
Dario Amodei
On Good Software Engineers
I set out to find a simple definition that would help managers frame the fundamental things they expect from software engineers.
Candost Dagdeviren
How to make Product give a shit about your architecture proposal
I had a plumber over the other day. I was worried that my water service line might be leaking. There was a wet patch in the yard and I noticed that one of my sink’s water pressure seemed to be lowe

Andy G's BlogZackary Naas
If you don’t examine what worked, how will you know what works?
This is one of my favorite bits from fellow anglophone Québécois Norm McDonald: Norm: not a lung expert One of the goals I believe that we all share for post-incident work is to improve the system.

Surfing ComplexityLorin Hochstein

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Don’t amplify the drama
We’ve all been there: that soul-crushing moment when a critical bug slips into production.
The Manager's GuideCsaba Okrona
Mental Wellbeing at Work: Perspectives of Software Engineers
Novia Wong
Refuel or Die - Leadership Freak
Fatigue isn’t overwork; it’s failure to refuel. You go dry when you pour out more than you pour in. You can’t flourish on empty. Life management is energy management. Depletion is inevitable apart from intervention. Energy flows out naturally; it’s restored intentionally. Create a refueling schedule. Learn more

Leadership FreakDan Rockwell
Why Workplace Well-Being Programs Don’t Achieve Better Outcomes
By 2026, global corporate spending on wellness programs is set to top $94.6 billion, yet anticipated improvements in well-being are not being realized, and, in fact, mental health needs are continuing to rise around the world. Drawing on a large body of recent research, the authors argue that well-being programs are failing, in part, because they focus on individual solutions rather than the broader systems that affect workers. The authors offer research-backed solutions to companies looking to better predict mental health improvements and increase the return-on-investment in their well-being programs.
Harvard Business ReviewJazz Croft

About our Sponsors

A huge thanks to all our sponsors and partners, who make Tech Manager Weekly and the CTO Craft community possible:

AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Coherence, Damilah, DoIT, Google Cloud, Jellyfish, Plandek, Skiller Whale, Softwire, Sema, Uplevel, Vention, YLD

If you're interested in sponsoring TMW or any of our events, drop us a line at partners@ctocraft.com.

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

Published by:

Andy Skipper