🍉 Time Management, Vroom, Inverse Conway, Team Maturity, Working Hours, No Code Reviews: TMW #222 by CTO Craft
Greetings! Hope you had a great weekend
We're going to be pausing the weekly Bytes events over the summer, but keep your eyes peeled for some very exciting event-related news over the coming weeks.. Plans are coming together quickly for something amazing in the autumn
Another bumper issue this week, so we'll dive right in - enjoy! If you have any feedback or questions, drop us a reply
Until next time
Andy @ CTO Craft
From the CTO Craft Blog
Leaders - Too Much to Do? Here's How to Get it All Done
Learn how to successfully manage your time and maximise your productivity as a technology leader with these four top organisational tips.
How Can the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre Help Drive Organisational Change?
Andreas Wolff shows how you can transpose Conway's Law to improve systemic communication and collaboration across organisations.
Reads of the Week
Building Your Own Agile Team Maturity Assessment
- Assessing a team’s agile maturity is an important part of the inspect and adapt process for a team
- It gives the team insight into how they can continuously improve their agility
- It is important to only assess things that can be acted upon; keep it simple
- Make sure to include the basics like agile principles, technical approaches, team dynamics, and how the organization supports agility
- An assessment is only as valuable as the actions that come out of it, so a measurable, continuous improvement plan is key
The Hotel Giraffe - by Rands
The 9th floor of The Standard located in the East Village of New York City. Pre-pandemic. I wake up mid-day and a full-sized giraffe stands in the corner of my hotel room. The view of mid-day downtown Manhattan is obscured by a full-sized living breathing giraffe. This animal is staring at me.
About our Partners
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Culture & People
The perfect number of hours to work every day? Five
Research shows that five work hours a day can improve productivity and bolster wellbeing. There’s only one thing holding companies back
Need More Fun at Work? 5 Do’s and 5 Don’ts
There's much more to workplace fun than having a Ping-Pong table in the employee break room, free soda in the refrigerator, and an occasional office party. Prioritizing fun at work is really about embedding fun into the work culture.
How to Give Positive Feedback to Colleagues – with Examples!
Surprisingly, the process of giving positive feedback to colleagues is the same as constructive feedback! When you hear the word feedback, what do you feel? In this guide, I will show you how to give positive feedback to colleagues in a way they will never forget.
Product Team Health (and Performance) "Signals"
How do you figure out whether teams are more mature or less mature so quickly? Knowing a team is more mature/less mature has nothing to do with WHY they might be more mature/less mature. Same with health. Same with performance.
4 Questions that Build Psychological Safety (Virtual Team Toolkit)
4 Questions that Build Psychological Safety Overview: Objective = Psychological Safety has been proven to be a key component of high performing teams. These 4 questions will help build psychological safety within your team members.
Leadership & Self-management
Does the Focus on Authentic Leadership Make You Want to Gag, Too?
Do we really need reminders of the need to be authentic as leaders? There are bestselling books on the subject on Amazon and articles in Forbes and the Harvard Business Review.
10 of the Most Effective Group Decision Making Techniques
As leaders, there are many decisions that we can make on our own but often, engaging the opinions and perspectives of others enhances the decision that is made. The group decision-making process can differ greatly from organization to organization because each team is unique.
Vroom’s Expectancy Theory
This article describes Vroom’s Expectancy Theory by Victor Vroom in a practical way. After reading you will understand the definition and basics of this powerful motivation theory. In 1964, Canadian professor of psychology Victor Vroom from the Yale School of Management developed this theory.
Insights and Observations from the Latest Manager Development Programs
During the past few weeks, I ran three different cohort sections of my live-online Manager Development Program. While initially geared toward new(er) managers, we had many veterans in the groups, all working on sharpening their skills around the fundamentals of leading and managing.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Overcoming One-Size-Fits-All Budgeting
Agile transformations can easily be disrupted by a traditional non-Agile budgeting approach that contradicts the flexibility, adaptability, responsiveness, and nimbleness required by Agility.
With Agile Approaches, No Need to “Meet” or “Enforce” Deadlines
I find two general buckets of problems for missing deadlines: how management organizes teams and the “need” for certain measures. (Yes, there are certainly team problems, and that's a different post.)
Scaling Agility
In a perfect world, every Agile team would be entirely autonomous. Cross-team dependencies are a common source of delays and errors. By keeping teams autonomous—if each team is responsible for a completely separate product—that’s not a problem.
Exploring Data @ Netflix
Supporting a rapidly growing base of engineers of varied backgrounds using different data stores can be challenging in any organization.
No code reviews by default
How we built an engineering culture based on trust that allows us to move incredibly fast without requiring code reviews. At Raycast, we do not require code reviews. Engineers push to the main branch and request reviews when they think it's necessary.
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
Please do remember to share this link if you know of anyone who’d like to receive TMW:
http://www.techmanagerweekly.com
Have an amazing week!
Andy