Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #131
Curated by Andy Skipper, founder of CTO Craft and mentor and coach to CTOs, VPs of Engineering and other technology leaders around world
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Reads of the Week
How to build a brilliant team: Hiring advice for startups
Ask any founder in Europe what their number one challenge right now is, and guess what they’ll say? Hiring.
The benefits (and costs) of corporate open source
Releasing and maintaining an open-source project at a corporation takes a lot of work. I saw this firsthand working for four-plus years on React, a popular open-source JavaScript library developed by Facebook.
How SaaS CTOs can improve their company’s security
For many SaaS startups, security takes a backseat to other needs and functions in the early stages of the company.
Culture & People
How to Size and Assess Teams From an Eng Lead at Stripe, Uber and Digg
Say your startup has an on-call rotation that follows the sun. Someone’s always on. One day, a member of your team gets an alert that disk space will run out on the primary PostgreSQL server in two hours. An hour later, he gets another page.
Tribes And Tribal Conflicts In A Tech Company
Humans are successful because we collaborate. Collaboration is our super-power. We can form a group with an arbitrary set of people, share concepts within the group and understand that if we make tradeoffs which are costly to us…
On What We Learned This Year: The 8 Habits Of Highly Progressive Workplaces
Today is the last day of what was a very exciting year; we grew the team at Corporate Rebels, launched the concept of Rebel Events, started to write our very own book, and -as the cherry on the cake- were nominated for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award! But that’s not all.
How We Hire Good Engineers, Faster
We had a large number of engineering vacancies to fill. Our vacancies were growing faster than we were able to fill them. We were finding hiring hard, time consuming and dispiriting. We’d heard from the people we’d hired that they’d found it difficult to be hired by us.
Leadership & Self-management
Don’t ask forgiveness, radiate intent
Although is pains me to reject advice from the late great Grace Hopper… this advice I do hereby reject. I understand the sentiment behind it: we are often held back by “rules” that don’t even exist.
The First Thing Great Decision Makers Do
As a statistician, I appreciate the quote by applied statistics pioneer W. Edwards Deming, “In God we trust. All others bring data.
What does a CTO do?
I frequently get asked this question, and it is a question that I sought out to find an answer for a little less than a year ago (when I became full time CTO at Cloudera). I did a bunch of online research and talked to a number of enterprise software CTOs whom I look up to (listed at end).
Camille Fournier on Prioritizing Emotional Energy
This is one of a series of blog posts where we share some of the key takeaways from our interviews with engineering leaders for our upcoming book, The Engineering Leader Within. Get notified as we release more interviews. “Anytime you take over a team, you're going to have some transitions.
Ten Habits of Incompetent Managers
Three years ago, I joined the board of a company whose management, I soon recognized, was incompetent. I said so, but I was a new board member and the management had a lot of old friends and allies on the board. I was listened to respectfully but nothing much happened.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Why This Opportunity Solution Tree is Changing the Way Product Teams Work
I’ve found a visual aid that is profoundly changing the way teams work. It’s working so well that I feel compelled to write a book about it. But that’s going to take time and I want you to have it today.
Three Example Technology Roadmaps
Roadmaps — they’re not just for product managers. We often associate roadmaps — strategic plans outlining the steps required to accomplish a business objective — with the development of products. And we often associate the creation of roadmaps with product managers.
Mapping: An introductory guide for product teams
Visual thinking is one of the most valuable parts of the creative process. It helps you think: drawing makes you get specific with your ideas and see them in new ways, so you can continue to iterate.
What Else?
On Presentations
Fabulous breakdown of the essential elements of the best presentations, and an introduction to a great-looking tool (not a sponsor, promise!)
Learning Synths
The guys at Ableton have created a great browser-based introduction to synthesizers - make sure it doesn't suck up your afternoon..
That’s it!
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Have an amazing week!
Andy @ CTO Craft