🧵 Roadmaps and OKRs, Process Cultures, Team Dependencies, Jerks at Work, Delegation, Alliances, NSA Security Report: TMW #256 by CTO Craft

Howdy, welcome to the week!

This week we re-launched our CTO Craft Roundtables, which are only available to members of the CTO Craft Slack Community - these have always been incredibly popular, and, predictably, the first, on Retaining Key Talent, sold out within an hour. We're planning to make these a regular feature of the CTO Craft events calendar, so if you're interested, apply to join the community, and keep your eye on #events-conferences.

A massive thank you and welcome to Code Climate, who've joined as a CTO Craft sponsor - their support, along with all the other amazing sponsors, enables us to run events, send out TMW, write amazing content for the blog and everything else we do.

That's it - on with the links!! Have a great week

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Bytes

CTO Craft Bytes - Roadmaps and OKRs Don’t Have To Suck - Fri, 11 March 12:30 – 13:30 GMT

Many people are a little jaded by roadmaps and OKRs done badly these days. In this discussion, we'll dispel some of the myths and common problems that come with roadmaps and managing Objectives & Key Results, and will present some new ways of going about these.

With Janna Bastow of MindTheProduct and Dhanya Jayachandra of Unitek AI

From our Partners

Code Climate Partners with CTO Craft

Code Climate is proud to support the CTO Craft Community in 2022 with a wide range of resources and activities to help engineering leaders build trust with transparency, enhance cross-functional alignment, and strengthen team performance.

State of Frontend 2022 survey. Pass it onto your frontend developers - from TSH

Let's check the present and future of frontend. Don't miss a chance for your team to be represented - the survey is closing soon. The collected data will serve to create a free report that might help you with your frontend strategy for the future

Reads of the Week

The Ukraine War - and Its Impact on the Tech Industry

Russia has launched a full-on invasion on Ukraine on Thursday, 24 February. This event has started the largest war in Europe since World War 2 (WW2), and is the largest geopolitical event in Europe since the breakup of the USSR in 1990-1991.

This article covers the impact of the war on the tech world.

The three hats of a technology leader

In IT services, we’re consultants at all times — not just to clients, but also to the project team, peers and delivery operations.

Culture & People

Low Process Culture, High Process Culture

When I changed jobs in 2020, I went from a low-process culture to a high-process culture (or: what I perceive as high-process, all things are relative). It was a bit of a culture shock. The process stressed me out. For instance, my previous job did not have performance review.

See and Resolve Team Dependencies, Part 2: One Person Outside the Team

Does your organization have an enterprise architect or Chief Product Person? We create these positions to check that the teams don't try to implement something “wrong.” However, a single person in this position creates bottlenecks and dependencies.

Jerks at Work

Can you work effectively with a**holes? I used to think so. That I could have a ‘professional relationship’ with people I neither liked or respected and still deliver.

What is Developer Experience? a roundup of links and goodness

I recently contributed to a series of fireside chats hosted by LaunchDarkly. One of the themes that we discussed was Developer Experience, and how to improve it.

Hire the Best Folks, Even In a Crazy Market: The “First Ten” Rule

Hiring is harder than ever — but that doesn’t mean you should compromise on who joins your team. Or maybe, it means you need to select for something deeper than “years of experience in a similar role/function.”

About our Partners

A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2022 - you’re all amazing!

AWS, CircleCI, Code Climate, Karat, O’Reilly, Indiespring, Skiller Whale, The Software House, iTechArt, LinearB, Lohika, PGS Software, Albany Partners, 101 Ways, Steamhaus, Swarmia

🥝 🥝  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! 🥝 🥝

Leadership & Self-management

“Almost done” doesn’t count

Quite a while ago I changed my approach slightly to facilitating a team’s daily stand-up meeting. Instead of going through the items on the board from left to right, I asked about them from right to left.

Delegation is an art, not a science

This post originally appeared in my newsletter. Subscribe to receive it! When managers get to the “Delegate these tasks” quadrant of the Eisenhower matrix, they can hit a big mental roadblock.

Forming Alliances

Every senior leadership role gets lonely from time to time. It is natural and yet extremely exhausting. Even the most energetic people I worked with, when truly alone, see their resolve slowly abrade with time. I’ve got good news, though, you don’t have to accept this loneliness!

So you want to be a director in a tier one technology company?

Probably, you are currently a high performing manager considering your options, or you have recently started a director role.

4 Ways to Coach Your Software Team for Success

No one advances and develops their career on their own. Along the way, they have help and guidance from experienced colleagues, mentors, and leaders. No one advances and develops their career on their own. Along the way, they have help and guidance from experienced colleagues, mentors, and leaders.

Agile, Engineering & Product

How Do OKRs Work with Big Bang Releases?

I was helping a client recently with the beginning of their OKR journey. One of the success criteria I stress is an early and frequent analysis of data, both qualitative and quantitative, that indicates the work we’re doing is indeed progressing towards our desired goals (or not).

Trunk and Branches Model for Scaling Infrastructure Organizations

Early on in your company’s lifetime, you’ll form the seed of your infrastructure organization: a small team of four to eight engineers. Maybe you’ll call it the infrastructure team. It’s very easy to route infrastructure requests, because they all go to that one team.

NSA report: This is how you should be securing your network

The report covers network design, device passwords and password management, remote logging and administration, security updates, key exchange algorithms, and important protocols such as Network Time Protocol, SSH, HTTP, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

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:

https://techmanagerweekly.com

Have an amazing week!

Andy