Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #151

Hi there, welcome to the week!

We've now filled the first of our Online Mentoring Circles, but we have a healthy waiting list, which means we'll be starting the second Circle within the next month or so. If you'd like to schedule a chat about joining, leave your details on the Mentoring Circles page below and we'll get a call in the diary.

Charaka Goonatilake, CTO at Panaseer said this about his Circle:

"A truly unique coaching experience – providing sorely needed support for technical leaders. It's a hugely effective concept to bring together individuals leading technical organisations together with a seasoned CTO to discuss problems and actionable solutions."

See you next week!

Andy Skipper

Mentoring Circles for CTOs - join a Community of Practice and accelerate your leadership development

Learn about how a Mentoring Circle can help you build leadership skills as a technologist; super-charge your leadership skills in a Community of Practice for CTOs and other Technology Leaders

Reads of the Week

Activating High-Performing Teams

Progress is grinding. Something’s not working. Ideas that shone like pristine snow in the board room just aren’t sticking where it matters. The envisaged winter wonderland isn’t materialising. It feels like every initiative, crystal clear at inception, melts in the harsh light of reality.

We made a cold Russian soup!

Nationwide Digital, the NDAP team, build a common platform for all digital journeys to develop on, it's a challenge with new CVEs being released daily for so many components as-well balancing the new feature demand from our customers.

Culture & People

Implementing Culture, A Hidden Journey

Taking the time to understand what is important to you, and the future of your world is the easy part. The hard part? Implementation.

State of Remote Work 2020

When some people think of the workplace of the future, they envision futuristic-style holograms having a meeting or robots cooking lunch for everyone in the office.

A Step-by-Step Guide for Onboarding New Hires – Startup Frontier – Medium

Every hiring manager knows that the process of finding a new team member can be both exhausting and rewarding.

Toxicity in the Team: How to Recognize and Defuse

None of us are immune to emotional ups and downs. However, it is important that emotions remain outside the office threshold and do not interfere with performance. Today, many talk about toxicity.

13 Reasons Why Great Employees Quit (and How to Keep a Good Employee from Quitting)

He was one of the longest-tenured members of the team and seemed content on the job. Little did I know he had a number of motivations for wanting to make a change that may have been avoidable. The competition for talent is always high, and especially now you can’t afford to lose a good employee.

Hiring Engineering Leaders

This post is about the interview process for an engineering leader. Hiring involves a lot more than the interview part - everything from reviewing resumes, sourcing great candidates, getting them to come onsite, the interview itself, evaluation, offer, and close.

Leadership & Self-management

From Zero to CTO: Ralph Stenzel is in the spotlight

Bio: I started being interested in electronics (taking apart and building things) in the early 80s, got a Commodore C16 computer and then an Atari ST, building computer games in my spare time and also making early 8-bit computer music attempts.

Four Things I Wish I Knew as the New CTO of a Startup

When I first became a CTO of a startup, I was young and inexperienced. I was technically capable, had led multiple software projects and had a great track record on delivering software projects on time and within budget. But I really had very little idea about how startups work.

Learning to have an engineering vision

Saying that the last 18 months or so were stressful and full of changes would be a colossal understatement. Work wise I switched to a new team after over 4 years on the same team, which was then dismantled as part of a big structural reorg that was actually part 1 of 2.

High Output Management for (Non-managing) Tech Leads

I’ve written a bit on this blog about the highs and lows of my time in engineering management. I’m a team lead nowadays - less managing, more coding, but I still think long and hard about what leadership means and looks like in the tech industry.

Rapid Deliberation: 7 Ways to Hit the Target While Under Stress

In times of high stress, we want fast answers.  As leaders we feel the pressure be decisive.  But fast is not always best, and can sometimes lead us deeper into trouble.  What we need is rapid deliberation.

Agile, Engineering & Product

(A few) Ops Lessons We All Learn The Hard Way

Nope, not another Falsehoods post, but not entirely unlike one. Only here we have a few lessons in operations that we all (eventually) (have to) learn; often the hard way. Why things are the way they are, or what the lessons mean is left to the reader to interpret, agree, or disagree with.

Metrics in Agile: How to Effectively Measure Your Transformation Journey

Velocity. It is one of the most commonly used, abused, and misused metrics in Agile software development. Teams, their managers, and even their stakeholders often focus on “improving velocity” without considering the entire value delivery system.

Agile as Trauma

Andy says: "Clickbait title, but worth a read!"

While the Agile era has brought about remarkable advancements in project management techniques and development tools, it remains a tactical, technical, and ultimately reactionary movement. As long as Agile remains in this position it will be liable to backfire, vulnerable to the very depredations of bad management it had initially evolved to counter.

How to Build Trust Outside of Your Retrospectives

Trust is important — trust us. In everyday life, we trust complete strangers to hold up their end of the deal, such as...

Product Mindset: Encouraging Ownership in a Scrum Team

There is one product, one Product Owner, one Product Backlog — a simple rule.

What Else?

Sentiment Scale Reveals Which Words Pack the Most Punch

Does it make any difference whether a presentation went quite good versus pretty good, or if an earnings report is described as awful versus poor? According to a new survey from YouGov, word sentiment isn’t as cut-and-dry as one would expect.

Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel

Wheels are the archetype of a primitive, caveman-level technology. But in fact, they're so ingenious that it took until 3500 B.C. for someone to invent them.

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy