Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #137
Hi all - hope the week has begun well!
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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
Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
Context: I am a senior principal engineer at Fastly, in the Office of the CTO group, leading API strategy for the company. The management path isn’t the only way to be a technical leader.
Culture & People
A good onboarding experience for new hires requires two key things
In my time as a manger, I’ve encountered quite a few people who were badly onboarded. As a rule it takes as long a time or longer to fix it as it took to poorly onboard them. Sometimes we’re able to re-onboard people and make them successful… and sometimes it’s too late.
How Slack Promotes Social Learning at Work
At Slack, we define social learning as any learning opportunity, in any format, where the goal is to learn from one another. Employees are sometimes struggling with the same thing in isolation. How can we create a collaborative environment to enable them to help each other? Building a community of knowledge sharing is a powerful way to facilitate peer-to-peer learning.
What Makes a Successful Startup Team
When venture capital investors are doing due diligence, they focus carefully on the financial side of the business.
The five types of communication problems that destroy company morale
There’s a saying in software that all bugs are eventually user interface bugs, because someone has to see them to report them.
Leadership & Self-management
Developing Leaders: What To Do When Your Team Grows Too Big
Whether this is a conversation you have in your head, or one that’s happened to you in talking to your boss, you know the hard truth: as your team grows, it becomes geometrically more complex to manage your team.
Leadership Lessons: Brian Wang on Developing Self-Awareness and How to Overcome Your Personal Weaknesses
Do you know what your weaknesses are? How are your personal weaknesses reflected in your team? And what do you need to do to start working through those weaknesses to become a better leader?
As a leader, your job should change every six months even if you stay put
Leadership roles evolve, especially through periods of transition. As a leader, I have found my own role changing as challenges on the team change—around every four months I realize everything is fundamentally different, and the way I need to spend my time changes, too.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Advice to Product Owners from a Developer
The testers begin to ask what kind of regression this will take, when the product owner interrupts. We’ll call her Katy. “Wait,” Katy says. “We can’t refactor that. I’ve looked at it; that seems fine.
The Secret to a Great Planning Process — Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite
This article is by Lenny Rachitsky, a former product lead and head of consumer supply growth at Airbnb, and Nels Gilbreth, former Head of Global Revenue Strategy at Eventbrite. It's almost the end of Q3, which means annual (and quarterly) planning is just around the corner.
Faking Agile Metrics or Cooking the Agile Books
The ‘cooking the agile books’ exercise about faking agile metrics is compelling yet straightforward and built on top of Goodhart’s law. Goodhart’s law states that a metric ceases to be a useful metric once it becomes a target, for example, for a performance review, because participants figure out how to game the system.
The Power of the Elastic Product Team — Airbnb’s First PM on How to Build Your Own
Jonathan Golden, Airbnb’s very first product manager and now Director of Product, knows that flexibility can get you far in his line of work. Last year, it even got him to Cuba.
What Else?
Tech Interview Handbook
Preparing for my first rounds of tech interviews was really daunting - I wasn't sure what to expect and where to start. This handbook together with the Front End Interview Handbook was a great starting point for me.
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