Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #157
Hi everyone, welcome to the week!
Hopefully you're settling in to the new normal as quickly and painlessly as possible; you'll have read a lot, and hopefully joined some interesting discussions about remote working and hiring, and we've included some great resources and posts covering these topics here today. Also, keep an eye on the CTO Craft Events page for some upcoming virtual roundtables and talks on these and other vital topics.
CTO Craft is currently looking for sponsors, for Tech Manager Weekly, for the events we run and to keep growing the community itself. If your company is interested in helping us continue to grow into something amazing, please do get in touch.
As always, get in touch if you'd like to discuss CTO Coaching or Mentoring Circles - we're pulling together names for the 3rd and 4th Circle right now, so we'd love to speak to you if an online support group sounds like something you'd benefit from.
Until next week!
Andy @ CTO Craft
Watch of the Week
Secrets of a Strong Engineering Culture
Pat Kua: I'm very excited to share this talk. It's a new one that I built specifically for QCon. Before I start, I want to talk about two significant experiences I had in my career very early on...
Culture & People
Cultural Debt: Steps to Get Your Startup on a Solid Path
Your first hiring decisions can set your startup on a path you will eventually want to change to be more diverse. Getting out of cultural debt can be difficult.
Why remote work makes disagreement hard—and how to do it anyway
Having diverse viewpoints on a team makes that team better—but only if everyone on the team is willing to communicate those viewpoints. If people are afraid to disagree, then that diversity of perspectives loses much of its value.
How to Resolve a Conflict When Both Sides Are Right
If you’re trying to innovate, taking a critical business decision, or just figuring out the truth, conflict isn’t just expected — it’s essential. If everyone has the same idea, chances are it’s obvious and not very insightful. But conflict is hard.
Remote working doesn’t suit everyone, and it exposes woolly leadership
Working from home sounds great in theory, but if you’ve never done it before it can take getting used to. For starters the home environment is full of distractions.
Working remotely once the novelty has worn off
There have been many posts about the positives of remote working, but not too many about the negatives. Cronofy has been distributed from the beginning and I’ve gone through various levels of working remotely as part of that, and seen others do the same.
Leadership & Self-management
How to share your company vision as a leader
Thrown around by every nearly business book and article, “vision” is often used vaguely, without nuance or thoughtfulness. Yet despite it’s watered-down usage, “vision” is the most important information for us to communicate across a team.
Rethinking Managing and Leading in Real-Time
It’s hard to know what to do when confronted with a crisis at scale where there are no modern precedents. The fear is palpable—for our loved ones, our colleagues, and for those in our communities.
A Female CTO Shares Her Thorny Journey In the Male-Dominated Tech Industry
As a female tech leader and a commercial strategist, Colette helps ensure the successful delivery of bespoke solutions to Evolve multinational clients. Besides, Colette is my boss.
Leadership Caffeine™—It’s Time to Deliberately Strengthen Your Internal Network
How Hard Are You Working at Developing or Fixing the Right Relationships? By now, most of us understand the importance of developing and maintaining a strong network in our professional lives.
12 Questions to Ask Your Team to Become a Better Coach at Work
Ever had a great manager that invested time in helping you grow and develop? It felt great to have a coach at work, didn’t it? Now, as a manager, it may be tempting to leave your team to do the same. However, that would be a big mistake.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Remote Agile (Part 1): Practices & Tools for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and Product Owners
Delve into the particularities of practicing remote Agile with distributed teams. Part 1 covers practices and tools — Age-of-Product.com.
Virtual Liberating Structures — Remote Agile (Part 2)
Last week, we addressed basic practices and tools of remote agile with distributed teams. Based on that article, I also ran a live virtual class, the recording of which will be made available soon on the Age-of-Product’s Youtube channel.
Mastering Zoom — Remote Agile (Part 3)
In this third post of the Remote Agile series, we address the tool at the heart of working with a distributed team as a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, or Product Owner: Zoom.
How we measure our development process now that we’re 100% remote
Our working dynamics changed literally overnight across every possible dimension. Physical working environment, family demands during working hours, communication with co-coworkers, team meetings. And of course the actual process of making software changed.
Zen and Code Maintenance
Warning: This may be a little bit preachy. If so, it’s only because I’m a little bit frustrated by it. We’ve had a bad habit at our house over the years. When we used a tool, we’d neglect to put it back in its proper place.
Remote Team Flow EventStorming for Retrospectives
Visualise your team’s process and you’ll uncover a higher quantity and higher quality opportunities for improving how you work as a team compared to relying on traditional retrospective formats.
What Else?
Machine translates brainwaves into sentences
Scientists have taken a step forward in their ability to decode what a person is saying just by looking at their brainwaves when they speak. They trained algorithms to transfer the brain patterns into sentences in real-time and with word error rates as low as 3%.
COVID-19 Trends - See the pandemic's (funnier) consumer impact
Glimpse tracks every topic across the internet.
Here are the non-obvious trends impacted by Coronavirus.....
That’s it!
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Have an amazing week!
Andy