🥑 Gaming Dev Metrics, Candidate Experience, Anxiety at Work, Calendar Management, #NoEstimates: TMW #225 by CTO Craft

Hello again!

Last week saw the inaugural session of our 10th consecutive Mentoring Circle - the popularity of these groups shows how powerful having a tight-knit group of peers with a regular meeting slot can be. Over the last 18 months, the Circles have covered hundreds of topics like

• Managing tech budgets and forecasting
• Org design
• Remote hiring
• Tech vision and strategy creation
• Context switching
• Burnout and stress
• Progression frameworks and people development
• Metrics and transparency
• Stakeholder management
• And many, many more

We'll be launching some more Circles later in the year, so if you're interested in learning more, drop us your details through ctocraft.com/mentoring-circles and we'll schedule a chat.

On to the links! Have a great week

Andy @ CTO Craft

From the CTO Craft Blog

Data-driven negotiation with SLIs, SLOs and Error Budgets - Part Two

In this second part, Hopin's Software Engineering Manager, Evelina Vrabie extols the benefits of having an Error Budget when being data-driven

Reads of the Week

How to Game Dev Metrics

What leads teams to game metrics within their organization? On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, we speak with agile expert Ray Elenteny, Principal Owner at Solutech Consulting, about how people game dev metrics and the underlying issues in culture & leadership that lead to it.

About our Partners

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

AWS, O'Reilly, Karat, CircleCI, Indiespring, Skiller Whale, iTechArt, LinearB, PGS Software, 101 Ways, The Software House, Albany Partners, The Scale Factory

🥝 🥝  If you’re interested in reaching thousands of senior technology leaders and decision makers, drop a reply to this email to see our Partnership Opportunities! 🥝 🥝

Culture & People

Bad Candidate Experience Is Expensive

The recruiting process is essential for every business as it helps in finding the right talents that are going to help the company grow and be more successful. And as all business owners know, finding these talents is not an easy task.

Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

Dropbox Engineering Career Framework The Engineering Career Framework is your source for how to achieve impact for your role and team and how to grow in your engineering career. For managers, it can help you set expectations with your teams and hold them accountable for their work.

A return to cottage work

Businesses care about productivity. At the core of their ability to create a profit is the simple formula of work produced per dollar spent. used a stopwatch to revolutionize the production of cars and just about everything else.

What’s allowed to count as a cause?

Imagine a colleague comes to you and says, “I’m doing the writeup for a recent incident. I have to specify causes, but I’m not sure which ones to put. Which of these do you think I should go with?” There’s a sense in which all of these can count as causes.

4 Tips on How to Deal with Anxiety at Work in the Long-Term

How can you support your team members dealing with workplace anxiety? What should you avoid to stop the situation from getting worse? And what does it take to develop your emotional intelligence and understand your team’s feelings to help them thrive?

Leadership & Self-management

How to Keep Your Team Engaged When You Have Low Morale at Work

At many companies, low morale is a fact of life. Any number of problems can stifle people, leaving them unmotivated and struggling to do their job. As a manager, you may feel low morale yourself; no one is immune to the harsh realities of the modern workplace.

How to build your ideal calendar

Last fall, we announced that Dropbox would make a major shift to a Virtual First work environment — meaning that all Dropboxers would now be given the freedom to work where, when, and how best suits them.

3 Important Reminders For Effective Decision-Making As A Leader

One of the most important parts of decision-making is that a leader has to understand the landscape, it’s rate of change and how it’s changing to make informed decisions that maintain an organizations relevance. Effective decision-making is the core of competent leadership.

Making ‘Big Changes’ Successfully

I joined a team many years ago as a consultant working on an internal application with a tight deadline. Our strong team spirit and an ambitious goal focused our efforts, and we were on track to deliver. But I was curious to find out more about the teams around us.

Agile, Engineering & Product

The Right Way to Ship Software

In a profession where we carry out decade-spanning holy wars over tab widths and capitalization, it’s no surprise that people get attached to their development and release habits. But if shipping so much software has taught me one thing, it’s to be an agnostic.

Data Engineers of Netflix — Interview with Kevin Wylie

This post is part of our “Data Engineers of Netflix” series, where our very own data engineers talk about their journeys to Data Engineering @ Netflix. Kevin Wylie is a Data Engineer on the Content Data Science and Engineering team.

No Estimates at Scale in the US Federal Government

My “No Estimates” report tells the story of an empowered Agile product group of three Scrum teams who stopped using story points to estimate their work in the fast-moving days following a troubled production release.

Build a Better Dashboard for Your Agile Project

Today’s organizations are under pressure to adapt their infrastructures and processes to a more digitally based, dynamic marketplace.

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