Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #136

Hi all - hope the week has begun well!

Makers Academy is a developer bootcamp in London that prides itself on the diversity and quality of its graduates. If you're looking to diversify your tech talent pool and you're in London, I recommend checking out their Careers fair in London tomorrow, October 16th:

https://employers.makers.tech/careers-fair-sign-up

As always, if you find something you think should be in the next TMW, drop me a reply to this email

Andy

Curated by Andy Skipper, founder of CTO Craft and mentor and coach to CTOs, VPs of Engineering and other technology leaders around world

Reads of the Week

Liberating Structures - an Antidote to Zombie Scrum

Key Takeaways Scrum is huge! It’s been massively adopted by organizations and has become the software development framework of choice. Many organizations and teams think they’re doing Scrum, when in reality they’re not even close.

Essential Meetings to Have With Your People as a Manager

When I first started managing, I had no idea what meetings I was supposed to conduct with my staff to help them grow. In part because I was at a smaller organization and we were inventing processes on the fly and also because I did not have a manager who conducted or introduced me to these meetings.

Culture & People

Cultivating High-Performing Teams in Hypergrowth

I work for a company called N26. We're in a mission to build the first bank you'll love. It's not something that you often hear in the same sentence, a bank and love. We're based in Germany, so our headquarters is in Berlin, we have a German banking license. We're coming to the U.S.

5 ways to use Agile to act on employee feedback

Imagine an office bursting with Kanban boards, metric dashboards, user stories and a rainbow of Post-It notes describing ideas, pieces of work and measures of success. Rough concepts are put in front of stakeholders within days (not weeks), and an 80:20 approach allows ideas to evolve more quickly.

Software Engineering Promotions: Advice to Get to That Next Level

I've had a pretty good run with promotions lately. When I transitioned from being an engineer to management, I had eight people report to me. Two years later, all of them got promoted to the next level, as well as a few other developers, who joined my team later on.

Documenting Decisions in a Remote Team

One of the questions I hear most about our globally distributed team at Buffer is “how do you document decisions”? In a remote team, a more intentional method of making and documenting decisions is needed to help everyone stay in the loop.

Leadership & Self-management

The 7 best Agile Leadership tips after visiting Stockholm

End of September we went to Stockholm with 15 agile leaders. We wanted to visit several companies in and around Stockholm to see how they created a thriving environment for agile teams. After a lot of fun and inspiration, we concluded that the below tips were the most inspiring!

How to work with “stupid” people

On Quora today I saw a to the effect of: How do I put up with the stupid people I inevitably find myself working with? Here's my answer: I consider myself reasonably intelligent, yet I have had no problem surrounding myself with people at or above my intellectual level.

Temporal Dynamics – Coaching Teams Stuck In Discussion Gridlock

Those of you who’ve listened to Episode 11 of my podcast, The Law of Raspberry Jam, have heard me talk about temporal dynamics (check out the episode here if you haven’t already).

Agile, Engineering & Product

A Scrum Master Works on Three Levels

Through my professional experience, while serving my customers, working with Scrum Teams and training people in Professional Scrum, I have observed that some Scrum Masters only work to serve the Development Team and the Product Owner.

Build trust with Scrum

Looking back a couple of years ago, I had a chance to work with the great team. Yes! They are a great team, but not from the beginning...that was a broken team when I came. - The team used Scrum but the Transparency was lost. Development Team hid issues from Product Owner when he came to ask.

Scaling Product Development (for Startups)

Another re-post of direct email advice. Other posts in this series include Prioritizing Without Level of Effort, and Should We Have Deadlines?. This shift is a common shift when teams/orgs scale beyond a certain point.

OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities List — You’re Probably Using It Wrong

We break down the basics of what you need to know about the OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities List and how to use it the right way to support your development team.

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!