⏳ IWD, Resilience Engineering, Autonomous Teams, Faster Hiring, Skills Development, Breaking Executives, JTBD and Werner Vogels: TMW #205 by CTO Craft
Hey there!
As you'll have no doubt noticed, today is International Women's Day! When we started hatching plans for our first CTO Craft Con last year, we determined to showcase a diversity of genders and , so working towards 50% visibility for women and underrepresented genders became integral to our programming. When the conference ran in December ‘20, it was a huge success, and we're confident that the same will be true this time around
We’re extremely happy to be doing it again and welcoming a pool of engineering trailblazers to CTO Craft Con: The Delivery One including:
- Abby Kearns - CTO, Puppet
- Amanda Kabak, CTO, CleanSpark
- Bela Labovitch, VP Engineering, athenaHealth
- Charity Majors - CTO, Honeycomb.io
- Christine Spang, CTO, Nylas
- Emma Hopkinson-Spark - Chief of Staff, 101 Ways
- Julie Hendry, former VP Engineering, Abcam
- Maria Gutierrez - Senior Director of Engineering, Intercom
- Rachana Kumar - VP of Engineering, Etsy
And more to be announced shortly!
You can see the latest conference details and grab your ticket here: http://bit.ly/2Z76UIQ
A huge thank you to all the amazing women in the CTO Craft Community who help make it an active, helpful and inclusive space for all the members, as well as all the amazing women in the CTO Craft team who make all of this possible
See you soon!
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Con: The Delivery One - A Conference for CTOs, Curated by CTOs
Celebrating International Women's Day! CTO Craft Con will be presented at least 50% women and other under-represented genders - we're determined to help push the margins for diversity and representation in engineering leadership.
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
Reads of the Week
Spotlight Q&A with CEO and Co-founder of Honeycomb, Charity Majors
CEO and Co-founder of Honeycomb, Charity Majors shares thoughts on distributed teams and how the tech industry will recover in 2021.
Interview: Dr. David D. Woods
A discussion of the distinctions (and dependencies) between reliability and resilience, and how to build complex systems that perform under strain and surprise.
Oh, Dear! Contagious Legacy Code
In my previous post, I talked about anchoring bias, and how it affects the evolution and quality of our legacy code. I’ve argued that when working with legacy code, developers allow themselves things (in terms of quality, usually) that they otherwise wouldn’t.
About our Partners
A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2021 - you’re all amazing!
AWS, Indiespring, LinearB, Honeycomb, 101 Ways, Albany Partners, YLD, The Scale Factory and Skiller Whale
🥝 🥝 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
Autonomous, Self-Organizing Teams Don’t Work
Autonomous, self-organizing teams are often understood as a core aspect of Agile. They hold the promise of unlocking people and giving them an environment where they can show up at their best and achieve the extraordinary. Yet, they don’t work.
How Typeform reduced hiring times by 43% in two quarters
63 days. That’s how long it took me to get hired at Typeform. That’s two full moon cycles. Of course not everyone took so long. But seriously, why so many days? Why so many steps? Because Typeform wants what every company wants: competence and cultural fit. It just took ages.
Back To The Office
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a blog post warning the tech community about a new coronavirus in China[0] and the likelihood we will see multiple viral waves. By end of March, 2021, the US is estimated to have enough vaccine to cover roughly half its adult population for COVID.
How to Cultivate a Learning Culture by Establishing a ‘Circle of Safety’
We often hear company executives talk about the kind of culture they offer their employees. Apple says it has a culture of innovation, Gamestop’s culture revolves around creativity and agility, and GE is known for its results-oriented culture.
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
Tech Leaders, where is your Team?
Attracting the right talent is one of the biggest challenges tech companies face nowadays, but it is only one side of the coin. Keeping this talent is equally important and a lot of companies fail in this process.
The Velocity of Skill Development: Quickly Closing the Gap
We are remarkably inefficient at skill development. Understanding the nuances of how repetitions, situations, and feedback interconnect offers us a few small changes that lead to remarkable improvements in skill acquisition. We think that skill development is a function of repetitions.
When Executives Break
When your company is scaling rapidly due to product market fit, one of the biggest impediments (or boosters) to growth will turn out to be the composition of your executive team.
How to Tell When Your Startup Needs Engineering Managers
It’s a tough decision. Most early-stage startups aren’t flush with cash. Every dollar they spend on an “expensive” manager is one less dollar they can spend on a direct contributor to the codebase.
Mistakes I’ve Made as an Engineering Manager
I’ve been a manager for many years at companies of different scale. Through these experiences, I’ve done my share of learning, and made some mistakes along that way that were important lessons for me. I want to share those with you.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Build Products That Solve Real Problems With This Lightweight JTBD Framework
Drawing on her experiences building products at Lumosity, Oculus, and Facebook's New Product Experimentation group, Sunita Mohanty shares a lightweight "jobs-to-be-done" framework for early-stage product teams, along with templates and go-to-market tactics.
On “technical debt”
The term “technical debt” is a useful one. Unfortunately, as with anything useful, it is overused and used sloppily. It’s also sometimes misused to disparage a historical decision somebody disagrees with. But more than that, I think it is broadly misinterpreted.
Momentum > Urgency and Other Counter-Intuitive Principles for Increasing Velocity
My name is Elisabeth Hendrickson. Let's talk about speed, more specifically, speed of software project delivery. It's amazing, nobody ever says, "I want to figure out how to go slower and be more methodical, and cautious."
Software Architecture 3 Ways
Abstract: Architecture is a specific abstraction, but it is hard to describe it to others. Most of our explanations refer back to shared experiences – but early career developers don’t yet have those experiences.
What Else?
A Second Conversation with Werner Vogels
In 2006, acmqueue published a conversation between Jim Gray and Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO, in which Vogel explained that Amazon should be viewed not just as an online bookstore but as a technology company. In the intervening 14 years, Amazon's distributed systems, and the patterns used to build and operate them, have grown in influence.
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
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