Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #174

Hey there!

We ended last week with an amazing Bytes event on Agile leadership, featuring four amazing panelists from the world of agile transformation and consultancy. It's a great watch, highly recommended!

We'll be taking a break from Bytes events over August, but keep your eyes peeled for news of our next sessions in September - there are some fantastic plans coming together.

Have you joined the CTO Craft Slack yet? We have over 1400 members and growing - if having immediate access to peers around the world for feedback and advice sounds good, have a look at the CTO Craft community page, and fill in the form!

Thanks to our sponsors this week, AWS! Reply to this email if you’d like to know more about partnering with CTO Craft

Until next time!

Andy @ CTO Craft

From our Partners

Selecting the Right Database for Your Application - from AWS

This webinar outlines a purpose-built strategy for databases, where you choose the right tool for the job. We will explain why your application should drive the requirements of a database, not the other way around.

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Reads of the Week

VPE and CTO - The First 90 Days

I put this mind map together a few years ago after a discussion about what a new VP of Engineering or CTO should think about in their first 90 days in a new role.

Legacy Architecture Modernisation With Strategic Domain-Driven Design

Most organisations go through an architecture modernisation effort at some point as their systems drift into a state of intolerable maintenance costs and they diverge too far from modern technological advances. I’ve seen some organisations deliver hugely impressive modernisation programmes.

Culture & People

The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2020 Infographic

This report presents the combined results of the fourth annual Developer Ecosystem Survey conducted by JetBrains. Feedback from 19,696 developers whom we surveyed in the beginning of 2020 helped us identify the latest trends around tools, technologies, programming languages, and many other exciting facets of the development world.

Managing for Neurodiversity

I don’t think of neurodivergent people as abnormal or disabled. They simply receive information about the world and process it in different ways. In fact, no two people see and respond to the world in the same way. We all need to make accommodations for these differences whether we’re talking about introversion, extraversion, autism, or dyslexia.

How to Turn Around an Underperforming Employee

Whether they got off to a bad start, or seem to be a star losing their shine, this process can give you an approach to improve the situation for both of you.

The Right Compensation Model for Remote-First Teams, an Unsolved Case

A lot has been written about companies going fully remote or remote-first, and what it means for their people’s productivity and overall well-being. Not so much is being written about the challenges those transformations pose to employers in terms of global compensation strategies.

Independence,autonomy,too many small teams

“The two pizza team” paradigm has become really popular in the context of organizing software teams. The idea is to have small, self-reliant teams working independently to solve problems.

Leadership & Self-management

Which extra-curricular activities are best for CTO growth?

‘Experience is the teacher of all things’ — so said a once mighty Julius Caesar, who knew a thing or two about leadership. While we don’t recommend adopting a dictatorial approach to reforming tax systems (albeit for the better) or engaging in warfare, we do advocate trying new things simply because of what you might learn.

What Bad Managers, Good Managers, and Great Managers Do

There might be more to management to that, but I think that’s a pretty good start. “Lean management,” or the Toyota management style, encourages leaders to live in that “good to great” range (with apologies to Jim Collins). Bad managers bark orders.

Don't Create Chaos

One of the most harmful behaviors I’ve observed in ineffective leadership is a tendency to add chaos when one enters a room.

From a room called fear to a room called hope: A leadership agenda for troubled times

Leadership matters most—and is hardest to do well—when people face objective threats, when old ways of working are no longer possible, and when confusion and anxiety abound.

How to Be a Good Boss in Trying Times

Good leadership can be challenge in the best of times. But amid an unprecedented pandemic and economic crisis, even the best bosses are struggling with how to navigate turbulent waters. Robert I. Sutton and Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao know all about good bosses.

The 20 New Leadership Books for 2020

I’m constantly surprised by the number of leaders and managers who say they’re too busy to read. Leaders who don't have time to read are leaders who don't make time to learn.

Agile, Engineering & Product

DevSecOps: 10 Best Practices to Embed Security into DevOps

For companies that employ the agile approach, DevOps seems like a natural extension. Traditionally, enterprises started with integration, development and test automation early in the product lifecycle.

Engineering Productivity: Measure What Matters

Measuring the productivity of most professions is exceptionally challenging. Would you measure a lawyer’s productivity by the number of cases they close? Or a doctor’s productivity by the number of operations they perform?

Byte Down: Making Netflix’s Data Infrastructure Cost-Effective

At Netflix, we invest heavily in our data infrastructure which is composed of dozens of data platforms, hundreds of data producers and consumers, and petabytes of data.

14 Product Manager Interview Questions, and How You Should Prepare

If you’re seeking a job as a product manager, brace yourself. The interview questions used to assess a candidate for the role are rarely softballs, in part because the position is so fundamental to an organization’s success.

What Else?

Build a Toy Quantum Computer at Home

In the past few posts we’ve gone over how to interpret matrices, basis vectors, and eigenvectors. Today, we’ll put all that together towards a really fun goal - building a toy quantum computer at home!

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy