🧠 Magical Meetings, Performance Reviews, Work Sample Tests, Annual Planning, Swagger, MTTR, Rhythm: TMW #242 by CTO Craft
Hello there!
Thank you to everyone who attended last week's CTO Craft Con 3.0, as well as all the amazing speakers and MCs, our sponsors, and the team at CTO Craft who made it all happen. It was an amazing week. If you participated, you should by now have received an email with a password-protected link to the session recordings; if not, drop me a reply here and I'll get the details over to you as soon as possible.
With the conference out of the way, our CTO Craft Bytes series kicks off again - this Thursday, we'll be chatting with Douglas Ferguson of Voltage Control, who'll be walking us through some patterns and best practices for ensuring your meetings are useful and impactful. Don't miss it!
Until next time
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Bytes
CTO Craft Bytes - Magical Meetings, Thu 18 Nov 2021 at 18:00 GMT
Poorly run and unorganised meetings cost businesses both financially and culturally, and participants don’t reach their creative potential. It’s possible for your work environment to produce more meaningful and fruitful outcomes. Prevent terrible meetings from happening by implementing pro-level meeting mantras and frameworks before, during and after your meetings.
Reads of the Week
The Performance Review Guide for Managers — Templates and Examples for Better Feedback
Performance reviews are key to accelerating your report's career. A former Airbnb Product Lead shares the conversation template that he's used to build high-performing teams and motivate growth all year long.
How to give better employee performance reviews? Don’t.
Our take on how to give better employee performance reviews – and what to consider instead. “How to give better employee performance reviews?” This is a question I’ve consistently received over the years, and becomes more pronounced as we enter performance review season.
About our Partners
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Culture & People
The tradeoff between inclusivity and predictive value
Some form of work sample test is critical to hiring well. However, work sample tests are also a minefield: the space is littered with silly practices like whiteboarding, FizzBuzz, Leetcode, and “reverse a linked list”-style bullshit.
Platform Teams
Platform teams are the building blocks that product teams use to ship business-facing functionality. Products are built on top of platforms, which platforms enable product teams to move faster. Platform teams are key in scaling up high-growth engineering organizations.
21 Experts on the Future of Expertise
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said. Right now, we’re either witnessing a golden age of expertise or a crisis of expertise, depending on who you ask.
22 great improv games for better collaboration (and fun!)
When it comes to collaboration, there’s a lot we can learn from the world of improv comedy and drama.
Leadership & Self-management
Annual Planning (Wicked Problem)
I had a lot of fun doing this podcast with Melissa Perri. We chat about patterns across product teams, as well as how to make sure you’re moving forward in your career. Check it out. Tis the season for annual planning.
Becoming a CTO – Puppies, Flowers, Rainbows and Kittens
A former co-worker reached out to me recently. They are a director of engineering at a midsize startup and just got their first headhunter inquiry for a CTO role. Having never been in the role before, they wanted to know what the position was like and how to prepare for the interviews.
3 Commonplace Lies That Will Always Shipwreck Your Leadership
Many a ship’s captain has believed that lie, and many of their ships have ended up stranded on a sandbar or dashed against a reef. In the same way, there are lies that leaders are tempted to tell themselves every day. And some of these can shipwreck their leadership too.
Finding Your Swagger
This is a longer post than usual. I'll start with the punchline so casual readers can get the gist. But the rest will be a long winding path into the details of one of the most difficult professional experiences I've had, all the emotions I felt, and how they eventually led to the following lesson.
Agile, Engineering & Product
MTTR is a Misleading Metric—Now What?
Software organizations tend to value measurement, iteration, and improvement based on data. These are great things for an organization to focus on; however, this has led to an industry practice of calculating and tracking Mean Time to Resolve, or MTTR. While it’s understandable to want to have a clear metric for tracking incident resolution, MTTR is problematic for a couple of reasons.
Developer Productivity Matters
I have been fighting for investment and focus on developer productivity for a large part of my career. Platforms often focus on the user side more, and think that the focus should be on solely economic opportunity.
How we work: moving fast to ship customer value
Shipping is the life blood of a startup. The faster you ship, the faster you learn, and the faster you move towards finding product-market fit and reaching that first existential milestone for an early-stage startup.
Cut Out Time Estimates on Roadmaps: Get Into a Product Delivery Rhythm
All of the business of software, but especially the delivery of product capabilities, is inextricably bound up in questions about time. What’s the estimate? If we have N people working on it, how long will it take? When will we ship?
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
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Have an amazing week!
Andy