🎥 Metrics, Reteaming, Servant Leadership, YOLOsec vs FOMOsec: TMW #198 by CTO Craft

Hello there!

This week sees the return of our hugely popular CTO Craft Bytes after a pause over the holiday period. We'll be joined by Ori Keren of LinearB and Glyn Roberts of iTechArt as they discuss Dealing with Delivery Bottlenecks

📆 CTO Craft Bytes: Dealing with Delivery Bottlenecks - Fri January 22nd, 12:30 GMT

We'll be filling the Bytes calendar for this quarter over the next couple of weeks, and we're actively looking for panelists and speakers. If you'd like to get involved, drop a reply to this email

Don't forget to check out past Bytes recordings on Crowdcast.

On that topic, we've now opened up all the recordings from December's CTO Craft Con: The People One - if you'd like to take a look, the link is right below

Until next time!

Andy @ CTO Craft

Recordings from CTO Craft Con: The People One

In conversation with CTOs and technology leaders from around the globe talking all things People, Teams and Culture. Three days, three hours per day of brilliant speakers and expert panels featuring some of the world's greatest senior technology leaders.

Reads of the Week

Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

Technology is constantly becoming smarter and more powerful. I often observe that as these technologies are introduced an organization’s productivity instead of improving has reduced.

About our Partners

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

Amazon Web Services, The Scale Factory, YLD, LinearB, Albany Partners, Skiller Whale, iTechArt Group and PGS Software

🥝 🥝  If you’re interested in seeing our Partnership Opportunities, drop a reply to this email! 🥝 🥝

Culture & People

How to leverage metrics to manage remotely

We all rely on different signals in an office to understand the state of the team and identify warning signs that something may require our attention—or intervention.

I Was Told There Would Be Biscuits

In my previous essay, I wrote about how tech teams don’t learn. I don’t think it’s a secret that many training resources don’t work. So why do tech leaders put up with it, and pay for resources that they don’t value?

Reteaming — often

When I started at Storytel our team consisted of six developers. My first task was to grow the team, and after an intense period of recruitment, we were 15. It was clear that we could not continue working as a single team.

Fix Your Recruiting Messages to Attract Diverse Candidates

The business case for diversity is well-documented. Having diverse teams from the board room to the factory floor has positive impacts on…

Leadership & Self-management

CTO day 1: first steps and hiring framework

About a year ago, I agreed to be promoted to interim CTO at Akvo. This is the “first steps that I took” on a series of blog posts about it.

CTO day 2: downsizing the team

A very important project that was a done deal, and that will secure the organization’s future for the next five years, failed to happen. Not winning this project meant that the organization was forced to “focus” and reduce costs.

CTO day 3: Meeting "The Business"

After building a hiring framework to then downsize the Dev Team, next on my agenda as newly appointed CTO: the Hub Manager’s meeting.

What Servant Leadership Is Not

Steffen Heilmann is a firm believer in empowering his people and giving them opportunities to grow. In his early weeks as CTO at Aroundhome, he and his staff were heading into an important negotiation with their data centre provider to take over responsibility of a mission-critical database.

Three crucial skills that leaders must develop to become executives

Summary: Becoming a great executive requires a set of skills beyond what's needed to be a leader. Executive skills are subtle and can be elusive to managers, demanding a great deal of focus, courage, and dedication.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Service Driven Design, Pain Driven Development

One of the things I love most about SaaS is it’s the “as a Service” that really matters, not the Software.

On YOLOsec and FOMOsec

Possibly my finest contribution to the infosec industry is introducing the concept of #yolosec, first discussed when I introduced decision trees as a threat modelling device in my Black Hat talk back in 20171.

Software is drowning the world

One of the many upsides I’ve had from working at lots of organisations is that you get to see what’s common. Are things like this everywhere? Frequently, the answer is yes! An example of this is tech debt.

new codebase, who dis? (How to Join a Team and Learn a Codebase)

I have switched teams more often than I have had to implement an AVL tree, and you can guess which one of those two was taught in school. I wish someone had taught me how to join a new team! While learning a new codebase can be daunting, I've found a few things that work for me.

What Else?

‘With a $4 billion budget, we can do quite a bit around heritage technology’: Chase’s CIO, Rohan Amin

So much time and money is spent on maintaining technology within incumbent organizations. Instead of calling this tension “technology debt” or even “legacy technology”, JPMorgan Chase CIO for consumer and community banking Rohan Amin likes to call it heritage tech.

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