Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #127

Reads of the Week

Engineering Management Distilled: A guide to one-on-ones

Much has been written on the topic of one-on-ones recently, but the advice is either the-same-old platitudes or takes the form of “4 things you can do transform your one-on-ones”, which is a quick read and a quick forget.

Culture & People

The 7 Step Onboarding Process to Get Employees Fully Ramped In 2 Weeks

When most new employees join a company, they’re left to fend for themselves. Which means they spend their first few months tentatively stumbling around with their first few projects. Then the new employee isn’t productive for at least several months.

Health checks for Teams and Leadership

In this blog post I want to share a powerful tool, the Leadership Health Check. It will help you become stronger as a management team and reveal improvement opportunities for how you, as a team of active servant leaders, better can enable the agile teams you support.

Managing Remote Teams: A Psychological Perspective

It’s 2019 and it’s clear that remote work is here to stay. Each year, more individuals are opting to work remotely and more organizations are opening their minds to this trend.

Leadership & Self-management

From Engineer to Manager: keeping your technical skills

I became an Engineering Manager over two years ago. One of my main challenges during this time has been to find the balance between my leadership duties towards my team and my desire to keep coding.

Ask HN : How to speak like a leader, not like an engineer? : Hacker News

Imagine yourself having a conversation with your manager or someone in a relatively similar position about a decision or suggestion you have.

The Feedback Fallacy

Managers today are bombarded with calls to give feedback—constantly, directly, and critically. But it turns out that telling people what we think of their performance and how they can do better is not the best way to help them excel and, in fact, can hinder development.

Avoiding Trapdoor Decisions

A “trapdoor” function in cryptography is one that is easy to perform one way, but is difficult to apply in reverse efficiently.

Engineering Management Distilled: Transitioning from IC to Management

This article is the first of many (hopefully) in the Engineering Management Distilled Series. You are feeling excited. Maybe you’ve been working towards this gig for a while, or, if you’re like me, you were thrust into it by your boss.

How to Improve Emotional Intelligence to Be a Better Leader

What separates a good leader from a great one? According to psychologist Daniel Goleman, it’s emotional intelligence.

Agile, Product & Engineering

Architecture decisions: the belligerent contrarian and the rule of three

Here are a couple of simple rules that have helped me a great deal on my years as a software architect.

Prioritizing Without Level of Effort?

More reposts of answers to emailed questions, etc. I shared one about deadlines the other day. First, it is important to discuss what we are actually prioritizing. Are we prioritizing the opportunity to focus on (e.g. decreasing on-boarding time), or are we prioritizing an actual intervention (e.g.

2019 Scrum Master Trends Report Published

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report has been published by Scrum.org and Age of Product. The report explores salary trends, agile adoption patterns, and gender equality within the Scrum master role, based on the responses from over 2100 participants across 13 countries.

Technical Debt & Scrum: Who Is Responsible?

TL;DR: Technical Debt & Scrum If technical debt is the plague of our industry, why isn’t the Scrum Guide addressing the question of who is responsibly dealing with it? To make things worse, if the Product Owner’s responsibility is to maximize the value customers derive from the Development Team

What else?

Is It Ever OK to Lose Your Sh*t? The Joys and Costs of Managing Through Anger.

I recently bumped into someone who had worked for me, decades ago, when we were jamming hard to build a startup. “I was thinking of you”, he said. “You were the only manager I ever had that made me cry”.

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