Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #167
Hello there!
Some fantastic news - we're delighted to announce that Amazon Web Services have joined CTO Craft as our headline community partner! We'll be working together on some content and events for the CTO Craft community and readers of Tech Manager Weekly over the next year. Keep your eyes peeled for more details shortly.
A friend of the community is building Bloom (intro video here). It's a tool that makes it easier to organise, annotate and discuss content online. They're currently in Alpha, but this week we thought we'd give it a go using the articles in this very issue - click on the links if you want to join the discussion. The team are actively looking for feedback, so if you find it useful/horrible, they'd love to know why and we'd be happy to put you in touch directly with the founders.
Until next week!
Andy @ CTO Craft
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Event of the Week
Future.Works - Distributed Teams Conference
Time. Effort. Costs. Building a tech team in 2020 is starting to sound like a Twilight Zone episode. What if there was another way?
Distributed organisations have shown to be the most balanced working model to face the upcoming challenges of the future if you learn how to tackle them. We have several speakers from well-known distributed organisations like Buffer, GitLab, or Automattic that’ll share with you their experiences and advice.
The world is changing. Are you ready for Distributed Teams?
Reads of the Week
Stripe's remote engineering hub, one year in
Last May, Stripe launched our remote engineering hub, a virtual office coequal with our physical engineering offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We set out to hire 100 new remote engineers over the year—and did. They now work across every engineering group at Stripe.
Culture & People
Tech alignment with ADRs, Working Groups and Narratives
An aligned tech stack is key to drive tech initiatives like introducing new programming languages or changing communication protocols. ADRs are text files describing why a software architecture decision are taken.
7 Real-Life Examples of Constructive Criticism
Use our examples of constructive criticism to offer frequent, accurate, specific, and timely feedback to your direct reports to help them improve and meet professional goals.
What might we miss working from home?
Three months ago I was very happy to be working for a company which clearly and firmly believed in colocation, face-to-face interactions and collaboration.
How to Spot When an Employee Is Secretly Struggling
An “emotional triaging” technique can help managers identify early warning signs of COVID-19 burn-out and take appropriate actions.
Leadership & Self-management
Relentless empathy: When hate demands critical leadership
There was once a time when work was work and life was life. Managers and leaders didn’t engage in or inquire into the personal lives of their employees, and employees didn’t share anything about their life beyond the work they were expected to deliver each day.
CTO Craft Bytes - Dealing with Burnout
This free online fireside chat brought to you by CTO Craft will discuss the symptoms, causes and remedies for burnout in technology leaders and their teams.
Four Adjustments For An Overly Critical Leadership Eye
Spending an enormous amount of time inside our homes these past few months have given leaders an opportunity to do some thinking. For some, that reflection may have resulted in looking at team members or assignments with an overly zealous analysis.
The great mental models
So I Just Read “The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts” by Shane Parrish. The book is about multidisciplinary thinking: the art of combining thought processes, or mental models, from different fields of knowledge into a better understanding of the world.
Agile, Engineering & Product
5 Common Software Development Metrics That Don't Work
If you've ever wondered how to measure developer productivity, you're not alone. As engineering leaders we constantly get asked to produce numbers to show how our organization is improving. As software developers, we produce things - so it's logical we want to measure how much we're producing.
Anxiety in product development
Last year I stumbled across an article about anxiety in men. It highlighted how it can surface in atypical symptoms such as anger. I learned to recognise and work on my own anxiety. It also lead me to recognise anxiety in others.
The Gemba Walk: Identify Improvements at ‘The Place where Value is Created’
When it comes to business improvements, it’s important that leaders know what processes in the organization they need to work on and be able to come up with ways to add value to every task involved.
8 ways to know when you’ve done agile well
You'll find many measures of agile team performance and behavior out there, but the eight listed here are ones you don’t often hear much about—even though they're key to success.
What Else?
Energy flow diagram
This diagram roughly shows the origin of energy we can use to help us do stuff.
That’s it!
If you’d like to be considered for the free CTO Craft Community, fill in your details here, and we’ll be in touch!
https://ctocraft.typeform.com/to/XXRNqV
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Have an amazing week!
Andy