Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #130

Read of the Week

How We Increased Productivity 83%, Improved Remote Collaboration, and Prevented Burnout by Dogfooding Velocity

Thousands of happy customers validated our software– but dogfooding Velocity validated our values. A couple of years ago, our engineering leaders were anecdote-driven, like just about everyone else in the industry. We knew how much progress an engineer had made on a new feature because we asked.

Culture & People

What I Learned Scaling Engineering Teams Through Euphoria and Horror

This is Tim Howes, the closest thing to a startup green thumb there is. As co-founder of Loudcloud, he helped expand the team to 650 in just 18 months. Its meteoric rise was cut short when the bubble popped in 2001, but he was undeterred.

The two tracks of growth

How do we grow? You have a responsibility to your staff to understand their career aspirations and facilitate their growth in the right direction.

How Early Do You Need to Create Culture in Your Company?

Culture and values answer the question: “how do we behave?” Culture is created in how you act and what behaviors happen between and amongst those in the company. This is adapted from a conversation we often have when asked this question by founders. Imagine you’re a one-person shop.

Leadership & Self-management

Spotting the Dark Matter Tasks on Your Team

Ever get the feeling that your team is working on more than what’s actually in their backlog? Even with the best-laid plans, there are still many tasks that can lie between the cracks, distracting your team from the work at hand.

What does success look like as a manager?

On the surface there are as many answers as there are managers. Success is shipping the product. Success is hitting the team’s KPIs. Success is solving a deep technical problem. Success is nailing the roadmap. Success is increasing ARR. Success is solving the customer’s need.

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.

Agile & Engineering

Defining a Distinguished Engineer

I learned a lot about myself and the way big companies are organized over the past year or so. I had mentioned a bit in a previous blog post and podcast about “the N + 1 shithead problem” (from Bryan Cantrill’s talk on leadership).

An engineer’s guide to cloud capacity planning

If you’re a small company with big dreams for the future, one of the biggest advantages cloud infrastructure providers have over traditional provisioning systems is the flexibility they offer you to adjust the resources your application uses.

Building Agile Teams: Hiring and selecting the right people

Modern enterprises need to be agile because customers, requirements, the opportunity of data and the capability of technology all provide an endless array of opportunity. Opportunity is everywhere, but everything is not an opportunity.

Prioritisation tools and tips for Agile projects

We recently asked you what topic you wanted us to cover next. You picked Prioritisation, so we’ve pulled together a range of prioritisation tools and techniques for Agile projects.

Two Measures of Development Effectiveness: Predictability and Optimization

The global recession has had a strong impact on the software development industry. These effects can be felt by anyone speaking to a development executive.

What else?

Which Face Is Real?

In February 2019, graphics hardware manufacturer NVIDIA released open-source code for their photorealistic face generation software StyleGAN.

I found two identical packs of Skittles, among 468 packs with a total of 27,740 Skittles

This is a follow-up to a post from earlier this year discussing the likelihood of encountering two identical packs of Skittles, that is, two packs having exactly the same number of candies of each flavor.

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Andy @ CTO Craft