Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #181

Hallo again!

This week's CTO Craft Bytes session will be with Steve Pereira, who'll be showing some real-life examples of how the use of Value Stream Mapping can impact your DevOps planning significantly. See you there!

📆  CTO Craft Bytes - Real-world Value Stream Mapping for DevOps - Thu, 24 September 2020 14:00 – 15:00 BST

Remember, all our previous Bytes are recorded and available on Crowdcast: https://crowdcast.io/ctocraft

There are still a few places in the next Mentoring Circle, due to start in late September - if you’d like to know more, drop us a line!

Thanks as always to our Headline Partner, Amazon Web Services - if you’re interested in partnering, drop us a line!

Until next time

Andy @ CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

50+ Ideas for Cultivating Diversity and Inclusion at Your Company

Following widespread protests against police brutality and systemic racism, companies around the world are taking a hard look at their diversity and inclusion (D&I) programs and policies.

Fundamental Attribution Error: Don’t Be Quick To Judge Your Team Members

Think of the countless times you labeled someone at work as “lazy, boring, incompetent, stupid, irritating, biased, reckless, rude…” The lens with which you see others makes all the difference – are you quick to judge or adopt an attitude to understand?

From our Partners

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Culture & People

Designing a Candidate-Focused Interview Process

At ReadMe, we wanted to rethink the technical interview process to be more candidate-focused. Technical interviews can be an exhausting, scary, frustrating experience, which is the last thing you want if you’re trying to kick off a hopefully long-term relationship with a candidate.

Creating a Team Culture of High Performance

Some teams work despite the fact that there aren’t many standout performers. Others fail despite having some rock stars. Why is that? Why is one team successful and another not? I am always studying what makes a team great, and I enjoyed reading Mike Robbins’ book, We’re All In This Together.

7 Components Of A Successful Leadership Development Program

It’s highly profitable to train the next generation of leaders. These leaders develop a love for your corporate culture, they train emerging leaders and recruit like minded people into your organization while improving its cohesiveness.

Things to know about engineering levels

This twitter thread seemed to strike a chord with people, rather astonishingly so. I am transcribing parts of it for the sake of longevity and findability. Sure, if you’re a junior engineer, you should be able to level up to intermediate pretty much anywhere.

How I Taught the ‘Team from Hell’ to Trust Each Other

Virtual team coaching can help turn around dysfunctional teams. Effective organisations rely on teamwork, not least because it facilitates problem solving. Many leaders, however, are ambivalent about teams.

Leadership & Self-management

Hacking The Eisenhower Matrix

If you’ve ever faced a mounting list of to-dos, chances are you’ve tried using an “Eisenhower Box”—a matrix that helps you determine what’s urgent and truly important. As the story goes, the celebrated military hero and U.S.

How To Be A Successful Leader From Home

Before the pandemic, working from home was something that a few people did and a lot more were interested in trying out. Now it’s rather suddenly become a fact of life for entire workplaces and teams, and many of us are still working to adapt.

Why are CEOs failing software engineers?

Here is the rub: new value is a function of failure, not success; and, much of software engineering is about discovering new value. So, in effect, nearly everything you are taught as a business major or leader is seemingly incompatible with software engineering.

Meeting everyone on a new team

When I joined the Financial Times as Technical Director for FT.com, I inherited a team of around 50 engineers. One of the first things I did was meet each of them for a one-to-one.

OffBoarding as a Manager

There have been a lot of blog posts written about finding a new job or starting a new job with a 90 day plan, but not as many about leaving your current job. Any engineering leader leaving a company has an impact on the people around them, especially if you have people reporting to you.

Why is Burnout So Common in Tech? Let's talk about it

These are my thoughts on why I think burnout is so common in tech. I'm sure it's a lot of different things, but this theory has been on my mind for a while since it's a reality I've lived. Blind's findings about burnout: https://www.teamb

Agile, Engineering & Product

Scaling Crowdcast

Crowdcast has grown more quickly than ever due to COVID. Get an inside perspective from our Head of Engineering on the changes we've been making behind the scenes to keep up with the new scale.  | Written by Thomas Maximini

7 Product Backlog Tips to Make Work Flow

Ask ten agile teams how they do backlog refinement and you’ll likely get ten different answers.

What is Architecture Exactly?

In the past I’ve seen people present to me a list of technologies and tell me “Here’s the architecture of our solution.” But, in my opinion a solution architecture is no more a list of the technologies used than the architecture of a building is a list of the materials that it is made of.

Time to say goodbye to Dual Track Agile?

The idea that requirements cannot be defined effectively before their implementation starts was one of the drivers for the birth of Agile Software development during the 90s.

Agile Management Anti-Patterns — An Introduction

Learn more about agile management anti-patterns the aspiring agile manager should avoid during the organization’s transition. Becoming a learning organization is a challenge without them anyway.

What Else?

When Technology Takes Revenge

While runaway cars and vengeful stitched-together humans may be the stuff of science fiction, technology really can take revenge on us. Seeing technology as part of a complex system can help us avoid costly unintended consequences. Here’s what you need to know about revenge effects.

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.com/community

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Have an amazing week!

Andy