🌮 No Laziness, Mixed Seniority Teams, Virtual Storming, Too Many Meetings, History of S3, Tenet on a GBA - TMW #206 by CTO Craft

Hello again!

Here we are, just over a week from The Delivery One - the line-up is full, the agenda is nearly complete and we're buzzing with excitement. There are some amazing speakers with some real, incisive insight based on their huge, wide-ranging experiences with getting projects and products done and out of the door, with quality and transparency. If you're looking for ways to increase productivity and efficiency in your processes, you really need to be there.

Don't forget, all Tech Manager Weekly readers have a £15 discount code - togetherORDERLYgold. Make sure you enter it in the promo code section when purchasing your tickets. Drop us a line if you have any problems at all

Until next time - see you soon!

Andy @ CTO Craft

Spotlight Q&A with Agile expert, James Shore | CTO Craft

The award-winning Agile expert, author and teacher talks about mistakes during estimation and planning and radical approaches to scaling.

From Zero to CEO - Meet Thayer Prime | CTO Craft

CEO Thayer Prime shares how investing in people is key, taking a leap of faith to become a leader and finding her voice as a woman in tech.

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

Reads of the Week

Culture & Methods Trends Report March 2021

Key Takeaways:

• COVID-19 was the biggest driver of culture change in the last year
• There are dramatic differences between good and bad remote work cultures
• Management practices are evolving to adapt to the new ways of working and the expectations of the workforce
• Creating real psychological safety and focusing on employee experience is hard, but pays off in terms of engagement, motivation and outcomes
• Ethical issues, diversity and inclusion and tech for good make a difference and need to be addressed purposefully.

Laziness Does Not Exist

There is a set of unspoken yet deeply held cultural beliefs that each of us absorbs throughout our lifetime about the value of work and the danger of laziness. The “laziness lie” has three main tenets:

1. Your worth is your productivity.
2. There is always more you could be doing.
3. You cannot trust your own needs and limitations.

From our Partners

Get paid for your feedback - from Wynter

Wynter is looking for CTOs and tech leaders to join its research panel. Give feedback to landing pages and digital products get paid $30-$50 per survey. Low-key commitment, 10-15 mins per survey.

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

How Spotify Leverages Paved Paths and Common Tooling to Improve Productivity

Maria Jernström and Jason Palmer, two product managers with Spotify, shared how the company enables their development teams to operate quickly and in alignment.

Engineering Org Design: Code-centric vs. Product Goal-centric Teams

There are many facets to engineering and product org designs, and a full discussion could easily fill a book. One thing that is certain though, is that there is no such thing as a perfect org structure. Whatever is chosen is a compromise with a set of tradeoffs.

The resilience of mixed seniority engineering teams

It’s true that you need to do a fair bit of work to responsibly support people earlier in their career — but this isn’t a question of learning what you have to do to build performant teams despite the presence of junior members, it’s about recognising that you can build performant teams precisely because you have a mixed seniority team.

Virtual “Storming”: How to Work through Tensions with New Teams

Teams these days face a rather unusual situation: new hires are expected to develop working relationships with people they’ve never met in person. Onboarding, celebrations, and collaboration are tricky enough done virtually, though it’s possible to compensate.

Screened out by a computer? What job interviews are like without human beings

As the coronavirus pandemic continues, job-seekers expect to attend employment interviews online. But increasingly, the employers and recruiters looking to hire are sitting those same interviews out.

Leadership & Self-management

Too Many Meetings? Here’s How to Scale Back

If you’re suffering from too many meetings on your calendar, chances are your productivity is lacking. Learn how to scale back and make the meetings you decide to attend a success. Zoom fatigue. Burn out. Total exhaustion.

Closing the stress cycle

Nearly everyone has been enduring chronic stress of unimaginable levels. And like many, last year I started to feel the pressure physically.

As a CTO, how should you spend your time?

Time is a critical resource for all. I would say, more valuable than money. You can always earn more money but when time is gone, it cannot be earned back. There are three stages in the career of a CTO.

Avoiding Bad Decisions

Sometimes success is just about avoiding failure. At FS, we help people make better decisions without needing to rely on getting lucky. One aspect of decision-making that’s rarely talked about is how to avoid making bad decisions.

11 Conflict Management Strategies to Quickly End an Argument

In life and leadership, difficult conversations have to happen at times. Many find it difficult to navigate conflict in moments of heightened emotions.  They are rarely fun (unless you are a bad leader into that sort of thing) but often necessary.

Agile, Engineering & Product

How Amazon’s S3 jumpstarted the cloud revolution

In late 2005, Don Alvarez was just another software entrepreneur struggling to get a new business off the ground when a friend working at Amazon invited him to check out a secret project that would change the world.

Beyond REST

Many organizations are embracing GraphQL as a way to unify their enterprise-wide data model and provide a single entry point for navigating a sea of structured data with its network of related entities

Understanding Fake Agile

Some instances of supposedly agile management have as much relation to real Agile as someone wearing flamenco costumes and talking about flamenco, without having mastered flamenco dance steps or displaying a feel or flair for flamenco music.

The Relationship Between Software Architecture And Business Models (and more)

As an architect, how often are you thinking about business models? If every significant architecture decision has business consequences, then knowing the business model and which trade-offs to choose is maybe the most important skill of architects.

What Else?

I put Tenet on a GBA Video cartridge out of spite.

This movie was intended to be seen on the big screen. So let's put it on a really tiny Game Boy Advance screen and blow those pixels up so we can barely see anything :D!

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