6 min read

🐆 Engineering Metrics, Technical Documentation, Difficult People, Introducing Levels, Software Costs: TMW #202 by CTO Craft

Hello again!

The CTO Craft team has been busy gearing up for our big announcement at 3pm GMT today. We will officially be announcing the theme of the Spring CTO Craft Con: Delivery, Processes and Metrics, as well as the first ten names on our line up.

The programme will feature 18 amazing sessions and over 30 speakers, with keynotes, panels and fireside chats from some of the best in the business.  Gain actionable insights into how the greatest software organisations in the world build, measure, plan and deliver products and applications.

Keep your eyes peeled on Slack and our Official Website and Socials to be first in the know and please take a moment to share the news! A simple RT from 3pm would be amazing:

https://twitter.com/CTOCraft

Book your ticket now: http://bit.ly/3rGvVqs

This Friday’s Bytes event will be a panel on Technical Documentation, with CTOs Evelina Vrabie, Fergus Doyle and Io James:

📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Tools & Processes for Effective Technical Documentation - Fri February 19th, 12:30 GMT

Have a great week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

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

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

From our Partners

Engineering Metrics Scorecard - from LinearB

Engineering Metrics Scorecard - from LinearB

The best engineering leaders bring data to their weekly management meetings. This downloadable slide template helps development leaders organize team performance and translate engineering metrics in a way executives understand.

Culture & People

What Motivates Difficult People

What Motivates Difficult People

When a person acts disruptively in the workplace, coworkers are often quick to label that person as difficult. But in most cases, it’s not people that are difficult, but rather their behavior. People will often use difficult behavior if, in the past, it’s helped them get what they want or need.

How to Hire Your First Leaders and Clean Up When You Get it Wrong

How to Hire Your First Leaders and Clean Up When You Get it Wrong

You made it! Your startup has some early traction and now you’ve hired your first leaders to help grow the company. Trouble is that things aren’t going as planned.

Improving Organizational Agility with Self-Management

Improving Organizational Agility with Self-Management

Key Takeaways More and more, companies should question "why" they practice or intend to learn agile ways of solving their problems Bottlenecks can be encountered during an agile transformation in a company; through a "diamond" set of lenses, you can understand what may prevent your agility from thri

How We Introduced Levels to Our Engineering Organisation without Losing People

How We Introduced Levels to Our Engineering Organisation without Losing People

The good thing about levels, is the transparency. When it’s clear to people what’s expected of them, stress goes down. It’s much easier to give frequent feedback with reference. “Remember that expectation from the list? I think you can improve in it by doing this and that”.

About our Partners

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

Amazon Web Services, The Scale Factory, 101 Ways, YLD, LinearB, Albany Partners, Skiller Whale, iTechArt Group and PGS Software

đŸ„ đŸ„  If you’re interested in seeing our Partnership Opportunities, drop a reply to this email! đŸ„ đŸ„

Leadership & Self-management

How To Be Strategic (book review)

How To Be Strategic (book review)

Reading the great recommendation by Richard Rumelt — author of “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” — encouraged me to pick up “How To Be Strategic”.

Look Ahead

Look Ahead

When you’re driving a car, you shouldn’t focus on only the metre ahead of you. When you’re walking, you don’t put your entire focus on your next step.

Remaining Technical as an Engineering Leader

Remaining Technical as an Engineering Leader

The question “how technically hands-on should I be as a team leader?” comes up frequently in my conversations with engineering leads.

On Leadership: Why building trust is the core of every successful team

On Leadership: Why building trust is the core of every successful team

This is part of the ongoing blog series on leadership and management as seen through the lens of competitive sports that was introduced via the blog post: “Why Pro Sports is a Useful Analytical Tool for Business Leadership and Management”.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Basal Cost of software

Basal Cost of software

In my opinion, the development cost of each feature in a product can be divided as follows: The direct development cost of the feature or initial cost. A weekly or monthly cost only associated with the existence of this feature in our system.

Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

I am often asked what I mean when I say that developers spend most of their time figuring the system out. Let’s unpack the statement. The oldest reference on the topic I know of dates back to 1979 in a book by Zelkowitz, Shaw, and Gannon entitled Principles of software engineering and design.

Change. Chapter two. by Simon Powers

Change. Chapter two. by Simon Powers

Before I defined the Agile Mindset, the Agile industry mostly used pictures of Yoda or other spiritual representations of what it meant to embody the agile ways of working. It seemed to be a mythical abstract quality that was hard to define and was often glossed over in agile discussions.

Writing good code by understanding cognitive load

Programming is full of dogma. Programmers are so often self-reflective and obsessed with the 'new way of doing things'. It can make programming feel like a cottage industry dedicated to best practice and leadership, patterns and practices and trying to write the 'right' code.

What Else?

Box’s VP Engineering on Biohacks For A Better Career

Box’s VP Engineering on Biohacks For A Better Career

Tomas Barreto, VP of Engineering at Box, takes biohacking seriously. Like sequencing-his-genome, running-currents-through-his-body seriously. But don’t call it a hobby or a side project.

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