8 min read

🍓 Evil Dependencies, Manager Antipatterns, Toxic Teams, Career Growth Plans, Engineers in Support, AI for Incident Responses: TMW #396

Tech budgets - how much control do you have?

Hello again, it's Monday! Welcome to the week

Those readers who are also in the CTO Craft Slack group will have seen that Early Bird tickets for CTO Craft Con: Berlin are now sold out - we're now in the final stretch before the event on Sep 24th and 25th, and ticket numbers are getting small. If you'd like to come along, don't miss your chance! If you don't have the community discount code, drop me a line and I'll set you up.

We've been thinking about technology budgets here, and looking at how much direct control engineering leaders have over what they can and can't spend, and on what. Here's a quick poll - we'll be sharing the results next week!

If you're in the process of defining your tech budget and have some insights on how to go about it, what level of control you have or need, etc, please do reach out, we'd love to chat with you.

That's it - on with the links, see you next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

How to tame evil dependencies
Dependencies between software development teams in large organizations are an almighty problem making it important to look at dependencies holistically.
Collaborative Hiring and Agile Recruitment: Empowering Teams to Streamline Talent Acquisition | Management 3.0
Discover how collaborative hiring transforms talent acquisition. Learn team-driven recruitment strategies and agile practices for better hiring results.

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Manager Antipatterns
Many companies make the same sorts of mistakes with their managers, over and over again. If they were software designs, we’d call them antipatterns.
The First 100 Days: A CTO’s Guide to Making an Impact
Wherein we provide an example roadmap for new CTOs on how to navigate their initial days in the role.
If You Want People to Remember, Tell a Story | Andy Sparks
In my work as an executive coach to startup CEOs, founders, and executives, I too often see leaders get frustrated and disappointed when their team fails to understand or embody a core value. But when you’re at the top, you have to take responsibility. If your team isn’t living the values, it’s on you. You need to take a different approach. While docs and slides with values are a great starting point, I’ve found one way to increase the odds that people will “get” your core values is to attach them to stories. So instead of me telling you why a good story is valuable, let me show you.
Leaders Who Unintentionally Intimidate Others
Because of their influence and status, leaders can intimidate others without meaning to. An intense focus on getting things right and getting things done can project an intimidating presence to those they lead.

Culture, People & Teams

Explore Your Team’s Toxic Behaviours And Learn More Effective Communication Patterns
A do-it-yourself workshop to create awareness of toxic conflict behavior as a necessary first step to eliminate and replace it with…
The importance of having a career growth plan in the engineering industry
Take ownership of your career and create a plan for your growth!
The most important part of Team Topologies is also the one most people overlook – Another look on tech
We sometimes hear criticism that the Team Topologies approach is incomplete, as it doesn’t allow people to map the whole organizational chart. People like to create maps and charts, and there will probably always be ideas and approaches trying to map the entire universe of an enterprise. Team Topologies is not one of those.
5 metric buckets to check for a healthy successful team
Great things are hard to accomplish as an individual. No matter how talented you are, it is hard to carry a whole team or a whole company…

CTO Craft Events

CTO Craft Bytes: Identifying and Developing Future Engineering Leaders
Join us for a 30 minute virtual Byte to discuss how the best technology leaders identify and nurture future leaders within their teams.
CTO Craft Con: Berlin | 24th - 25th September 2024
CTO Craft Con will bring together 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.

Check out all of our upcoming Mixer events, including events in Edinburgh, Manchester and Gdansk in the coming weeks - is there one happening in your city soon?

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Fostering High-performing Work Environments for Software Development
According to Eb Ikonne, leaders should provide a motivating challenge or mission so that the software engineering team understands what success looks like. They can provide an enabling structure for effective teamwork, address things that negatively impact team success, and reduce or remove friction. Coaching can help people discover how to work effectively together.
Doing support makes you a better engineer
What we’ve learned about providing support that doesn’t suck (and does scale)!
The Fall of StackOverflow: A Data-Driven Analysis
Translate PDF files for free. This free online PDF translator supports over 100 languages, while preserving the PDF document layout.
Leveraging AI for efficient incident response
We’re sharing how we streamline system reliability investigations using a new AI-assisted root cause analysis system. The system uses a combination of heuristic-based retrieval and large language m…

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

5 mistakes – and 5 better strategies – for leading someone with burnout
Let’s say you suspect someone in your team may be suffering from burnout. What should you do?Here are five common mistakes that leaders make when it comes to leading someone who is or who may be experiencing burnout – and what you should do instead.You assume its burnout.We all think we know what burnout looks like, but it can be tricky to diagnose. Not only that, but some of the symptoms can be due to something else entirely.
Do the Real Thing - Scott H Young
Success in most things boils down to a simple, but easily ignored distinction: do the real thing and stop doing fake alternatives instead.
TBM 308: Boundary of Safely Challenged Assumptions
In software product development, we have idealized ways of working firmly planted in mission command, independent teams, etc. But we don’t have an established vocabulary for when things “go wrong” (unless they go very wrong).
Four Big Topics from the Succeeding with Challenging Conversations Programs
Strengthening as a workplace communicator takes focus and deliberate effort. Here are four big topics from my recent programs.

From our Sponsors

Did you spill the tea on GenAI?

Softwire would like to thank everyone who participated in their survey around GenAI. Whilst we wait for the report to be published this month, why not continue the conversation in the CTO Craft Community?

Join the CTO Craft Community

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