🍇 Hiring a VP Eng, Playbooks, Politics, Social Awareness, Patience vs Urgency, Retros, GPT-3: TMW #213 by CTO Craft
Howdy!
We've been busy working on the schedule of CTO Craft Bytes events over the last couple of weeks, and the good news is that we have the next three weeks of events planned. The topics (in order of date) will be Modes of CTO Success and Failure, Delivering Agile Data Engineering and Science at Scale and Developing Cultural Resilience.
Note that we've moved the standard time for Bytes events to 6pm UK time on Thursdays - you can take a closer look at the events using the links below and book your tickets
Our Reads of the Week encompass two topics that have been hot among the CTO Craft Mentoring Circles over the last month or so: how to bring in a VP of Engineering, and how to organise common tasks and processes in playbooks.
We have a new UK and Europe Circle coming together right now - if you'd like to chat about joining, drop us a reply, or head over to ctocraft.com/mentoring-circles to learn more
See you next week!
Andy @ CTO Craft
📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Modes of CTO Success and Failure, Thu 6 May 2021 at 18:00 BST
This panel discussion will define CTO ‘failure modes’ and ‘success modes’, with a focus on metrics, delivering value and how to effectively communicate this with your team.
📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Delivering Agile Data Engineering and Science at Scale, Thu 13 May 2021 at 18:00 BST
Our expert speakers will discuss scaling, managing the pace of model delivery, measuring impact and aligning stakeholders, as well as the importance of creating high quality data at the engineering level.
📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Developing Cultural Resilience, Thu 20 May 2021 at 18:00 BST
This panel discussion will outline strategies to drive innovation and overcome obstacles during growth, while managing challenges such as productivity, low morale, and rising stress levels.
Reads of the Week
Hiring a VP of Eng? Use This Framework from Shopify’s VPE to Get it Right
After more than 20 years in tech, eight companies, and thousands of hires, Shopify's Farhan Thawar shares his go-to-framework for snagging a VP of Engineering. From the skills that are most important to the questions to ask and red flags to watch out for, his advice will help founders dive several layers deeper as they approach this hiring search.
Runbooks vs Playbooks: explaining the difference
The terms runbooks and playbooks are often used interchangeably. They are similar--they both offer a method of documenting tactical and strategic executions of the goals and processes of your organization. But there are important differences between the two, and each has its place.
About our Partners
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Culture & People
How political should I let my team be?
There’s been much talk about the degree to which political conversation in the workplace should happen. As a manager, here are a few things to consider. There’s been much talk about the degree to which political conversation in the workplace should happen.
How HashiCorp Works
Andy says: "An amazing blueprint for building transparency around culture and values - well worth a look for some ideas"
A website dedicated to making our implicit practices explicit.
The Top 3 Ways Young People Can Reduce Remote Work Burnout
It’s been said time and again that young people entering the workforce have different needs than older employees. It’s no secret that COVID-19 has played a huge factor in the work lives of young people.
The Social Awareness Scale – a practical tool to help navigate inclusion, diversity and beyond
I’m Jihan, I lead the Inclusion and Diversity team at Wise (formerly TransferWise) – one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the world, made up of 2,400 curious and highly intelligent people.
Leadership & Self-management
Why Your New Strategy Will Fail
As organizational transformation consultants, we’re often invited to help functions, departments, and teams of all kinds within massive enterprises recover from failed strategy implementations. Regardless of the industry or organization, the narrative of each failure follows a familiar arc.
How Do You Combine Patience and Urgency?
Patience Prepares the Ground for Urgency: To act with urgency on the right things in the right ways first requires the patience to step back and determine what’s going on, what you’re trying to do and how you need to proceed to accomplish that goal.
Henri Fayol's Principles of Management
Today's managers have access to an amazing array of resources which they can use to improve their skills. But what about those managers who were leading the way forward 100 years ago?
Want Better Time Management? Start Saying No
I have a confession to make. I’m a people pleaser and I’m afraid my people-pleasing ways have rubbed off on my team. This was a revelation I had a few years back when my team huddled in my office to organize and prioritize our long list of tasks.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Introducing: The Agile Leadership Practice Library
The practice library is a system approach to leading. It recognizes that many factors depend on each other, and should sometimes be moved together. It answers the question, “how do I lead through others?”
Data-Informed Retrospectives
In their book Agile Retrospectives, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen popularized the idea that a Sprint Retrospect comprises five stages. The second stage refers to gathering data so that the Scrum Team can have data-informed Retrospectives.
How Airbnb Achieved Metric Consistency at Scale
At Airbnb, we lean on data to inform our critical decisions. We validate product ideas through randomized controlled experiments, and we track our business performance rigorously to ensure that we maximize values for our stakeholders.
The Art of Agile Development: Simple Design
When writing code, Agile programmers often stop to ask themselves, “What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?” They seem to be obsessed with simplicity. Rather than anticipaating changes and providing extensibility hooks and plug-in points, they create a simple design that anticipates as little as possible, as cleanly as possible.
What Else?
100+ GPT-3 Examples, Demos, Apps, Showcase, and NLP Use-cases
GPT-3 is the world's most sophisticated natural language technology. Discover how companies are implementing the OpenAI GPT-3 API to power new use cases.
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