🛵 Engineering Vision, Metrics, Compensation, Decision Making, Calendar Audits: TMW #203 by CTO Craft
Hello again
What an amazing week it's been - our launch for CTO Craft Con: The Delivery One went off without a hitch on Monday, and the rest of the week was a flurry of ticket sales, line-up planning and logistics. We'll be announcing some more of the speakers shortly, but suffice to say, it's going to be an amazing event - we're so excited!
Book your ticket now: http://bit.ly/3rGvVqs
This Friday’s Bytes event will be a panel on Boring Technology, with CTOs Jon Topper, Sarah Hale and Sara Stephens:
📆 CTO Craft Bytes - The Case For and Against ‘Boring’ Technology - Fri February 26th, 12:30 GMT
Have a great week!
Andy @ CTO Craft
Reads of the Week
Spotlight Q&A with 101 Ways' Kelly Waters | CTO Craft
Founder and CSO of 101 Ways, Kelly Waters shares his views on how delivery and the world of tech might change in 2021 as things pick up.
Creating an Engineering Vision
As a company scales to more people and more technology, it becomes important to have an engineering vision and a strategy to get there. In our experience, as you get to a size of greater than ~40 folks in an engineering organization, it becomes critical to have an engineering vision.
From our Partners
The Future of Project Delivery for Dev Teams - from LinearB
How can we make project management not suck for dev teams? LinearB & Clubhouse.io are partnering to solve just that. By integrating Software Delivery Intelligence with a Dev-first Project Management tool, teams are discovering the power of seeing live Git activity directly associated with a story card for complete lifecycle visibility.
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
Culture & People
What We Expect From Software Developers on Each Level
I described in a separate post details about the process we’ve been doing recently in our engineering department, where we started working with levels for our engineers and QA.
What in the World Is World-Class Engineering?
Right before the new year the company I work for made an announcement about a shift in ownership. As my friends and I run through what might change as things move forward I wanted to gain clarity about a particular idiom that has been mentioned.
Three signs your team needs Engineering Metrics ASAP
I’ve been using Engineering Metrics for a while, and I am amazed by the significant impacts on engineering teams. Metrics is a topic I genuinely care about. During my days at Plataformatec, we used to discuss a lot about them. At the time, we used to focus on an Agile perspective.
9 Tricks to build your Talent Acquisition function
Some practical pieces of advice for scaling your team after raising a Seed round. In my previous role as Talent Director at Notion Capital, I spent a lot of time thinking about key success factors in recruiting after Series A.
Compensation: Approaching Pay (a bit) like Pricing
If there is an industry wide-open for disruption it is that of compensation. Reward and remuneration hasn’t evolved much beyond the world of excel, salary surveys, and legacy finance systems.
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
🥝 🥝 If you’re interested in seeing our Partnership Opportunities, drop a reply to this email! 🥝 🥝
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
Operating Principles for Decision-Making
Last year during a retrospective, one of the engineering teams I lead acknowledged that making decisions felt like a slow and often inconclusive process. Going deeper, we found out that making relatively small decisions within the team had been the most taxing: many people were continuously involved in plenty of conversations, with little gain at a high cost.
How to start a new tech exec job
This will be a bit different from the usual stuff I write about, which usually deals with tech stacks and architecture. Why? Well, I recently took on a new position and I knew that I had to set up some clear basic guidelines to myself on how I’m going to tackle this new challenge.
Three Pillars of Effective Leadership
I am a huge fan of Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s Executive Chairman (and prior CEO). About five years ago, I watched a talk he gave at Greylock’s Blitzscaling sessions that deeply changed me.
Calendar Audits as a Product Manager
Time flies, especially if you are a Product Manager. Considering how multifaceted and cross-functional Product roles are, it is incredibly easy for Product Managers to get lost in the flurry of inbound requests.
How to Stop Being the Bottleneck for Your Engineering Team
But what about when you’re afraid to say no because you feel like you’re the only one on your team who can do the task? Maybe your team members seem too junior, or you don’t dare ask the ones who are hyper-focused on their own tasks.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Shape Up vs Scrum: 6 Months to 6 Weeks – How We Cut Our Dev Cycle 75%
From sprints to cycles, and from product backlogs to …well…no backlog at all. These are just a couple of examples of the differences between Shape Up and agile approaches such as Scrum. But, what exactly is Shape Up? How does it, when put into practice, differ from Scrum?
Web Application Security Checklist (2021)
It's scary out there for developers! One mistake in the code, one vulnerability in a dependency, one compromised developer workstation, and your database is in Pastebin and you're on the news.
Gremlin Releases State of Chaos Engineering 2021 Report
Gremlin released their State of Chaos Engineering 2021 report based on a community survey and their own product data. The key findings include a positive correlation between running chaos engineering experiments and increased availability
Piercing the Fog: Observability Tools from the Future
Visibility into those distributed systems and how they are performing is challenging. This article explores how observability for troubleshooting could be done from the user’s point of view.
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
What Else?
Google Is 2 Billion Lines of Code—And It's All in One Place
How big is Google? We can answer that question in terms of revenue or stock price or customers or, well, metaphysical influence. But that's not all. Google is, among other things, a vast empire of computer software. We can answer in terms of code.
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