🎩 Sourcing developers, Team Mandates, New Teams, Bad Leaders, Facilitation, Shared Services Teams: TMW #211 by CTO Craft

Hello again, welcome to the week!

A slightly different time for this week's CTO Craft Bytes session - this time, we'll be in conversation with James Goodrich of Albany Partners, who'll be telling us about the state of the technology leader roles market, and what founders and hiring managers are prioritising in their searches, and which skills and experiences are most highly valued. If you're working on your next role, or have plans to in the near future, this is a must-watch - again, note the new time!

📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Skillsets of Executive Tech Leaders - Thurs April 22nd, 18:00 BST

We're currently pulling names together for two new Mentoring Circles: one in the UK and Europe, and one for Canada and the USA. For our friends in North America, we have a free taster session on April 28th at 1pm PT, 4pm ET. If you're interested in joining the session and seeing what Circle membership looks like, drop us a reply. We'll also be holding some more taster sessions for European members in May and June, so keep your eyes peeled!

Thanks, and see you next time 🤓

Andy @ CTO Craft

Ten best ways to fail at Product, Design and Engineering | CTO Craft

Co-founder & CTO of Touco Labs, Evelina Vrabie advises on how to avoid failure during Product, Design and Engineering collaboration.

Reads of the Week

The Ultimate Guide to Sourcing Developers (PDF)

Andy says: "Grab this amazing, detailed list of resources and tools from the team at CodersRank - plenty of tricks and tips on how to use social media and other channels to find amazing talent"

Macro trends in the technology industry  from Thoughtworks

In each edition of the Radar we include a handful of “themes” that help the reader understand larger trends among the details of the individual blips. We only have limited space and often there are more trends than we have room for.

About our Partners

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

AWS, Code Climate, CircleCI, Indiespring, LinearB, Honeycomb, 101 Ways, Albany Partners, YLD, iTechArt, Wynter, The Scale Factory, PGS 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

Workshop guide: Clarifying Team Mandates

Purpose:

• Encouraging more initiative and responsibility taking in a team
• Clarifying a team’s mandate when it comes to making decisions in various areas.
• Clarifying expectations on a team when it comes to taking responsibility for various areas.

How to facilitate a team roles and responsibilities workshop

Roles are generally defined as the positions that each person on a team assumes — for example on a product team you might have a Product Manager role, a Product Designer role, etc. Responsibilities are the specific tasks or duties that team members are expected to carry out as part of their role.

Start Your New Team Off on the Right Foot

You’ve just taken a role as a team lead. While most leaders double down on setting clearer goals to rally the team, this is only half the picture. The underlying elements – like values, strengths, and behaviors – are what you really need to address to bond and perform as a team. But what if you’re rushed for time? Here’s where the Team Canvas comes in handy.

Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses.

Why are you hiring? Are you hiring to do more, or are you hiring to achieve more? Design your hiring process to find the right people to strengthen your teams’ weaknesses, rather than trying to find the best people.

Leadership & Self-management

Are You Stuck On Vision, Strategy, or Tactics?

When I joined Heroku in 2013, the organization was stuck. We’d made some mistakes, which led to bad press, and everything sort of stalled out. Engineers were writing code; designers were designing interfaces; product managers were scoping products – but very little made it out the door.

What Good Leaders Do When Replacing Bad Leaders

Any leader who is assuming a role previously held by someone else has to face their predecessor’s legacy, but those who are replacing poor or controversial leaders have a special challenge.

EMPOWERED Review: I Needed This Book 4 Years Ago

I'd been an engineering manager at Uber for a year on a team of 10 when my manager pulled me aside to talk about team structure. "What do you think about a reorg, where instead of the current full-stack teams, we have a mobile team with 20 engineers and backend teams? It would be so much cleaner.

The most powerful tool in my facilitation arsenal...

It's been a while since I've written anything technical (I'm busy writing fiction at the moment), but this post has been brewing for a year, and a meeting today pushed me into wanting to write it up.

Managers are Makers Too

As a manager, does it ever nag at you that you can’t find the time to properly think about your team members and plan their career development?  Perhaps you find yourself staying late to prep for 1:1s, or to put together that piece of feedback that you just couldn’t find the headspace for durin

Agile, Engineering & Product

Watch Now: How to Stop People Problems from Hurting Your Estimates

Today’s post is the final installment in a free series of training videos tackling common problems teams face when estimating with story points. The training will be available until Wednesday, April 21 at 9 p.m. Pacific.

Meet the Team: QA Engineering

We recently had a virtual coffee chat with Kristina, Sid, Ivy, and Savi who are all on the QA Team, to learn about the impact of their work.

Why Shared Services “Teams” Don’t Work with Agility

One of my clients wants to use shared services “teams” as they start their agile transformation. Their developers work on a product for months and years at a time. However, the testers and UI people are part of pools of people.

The Hardening Sprint — Making Your Scrum Work #2

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. The hardening Sprint is one of those Scrum failures that are particularly challenging.

9 Trends That Are Influencing the Adoption of Devops and Devsecops in 2021

Key Takeaways The transition to DevOps is accompanied by a shift away from monolithic architectures, and toward those that are composed of a network of more agile components.

What Else?

How to Make Your Meetings Fun and Engaging

If your team dreads attending meetings, it means they’re being poorly run. Meetings can actually be fun if the right thought and planning goes into them. Boring meetings are often a waste of time and therefore hinder your team’s productivity.

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