🥯 Executive Presence, Skills Gaps, Data Teams, Negativity, Fractional CxOs, Distributed Systems, Refactoring: TMW #317

Hello again, welcome to the week!

You'll have noticed that we've now formally announced our first in-person CTO Craft Con, which will be held on May 23rd and 24th in London - this is a massive first step into larger-format live events for us after being completely focused on virtual conferences since the start of the pandemic. To make sure it's an amazing experience for everyone who's come along, we've built a team of seasoned pros including our Head of Conference, Rachel Thomas - welcome to the team, Rach!

There'll be the usual keynotes and panels, as well as a Call for Papers - more on that soon - but since it's our first time bringing so many people together in the same space, we'll also be adding some great networking activities, as well as some great food and drink. It's going to be amazing.

We haven't launched ticket sales quite yet, but you can pre-register to be the first to hear about it here: CTO Craft Con London 2023

As always, CTO Craft Community members will get a massive discount on conference tickets, so if you're thinking of coming, that's the place to be. It's free to join, so don't miss out. You can apply for membership here.

That's it! On with the show - have a great week

Andy @ CTO Craft

What’s in Store for the Tech Market in 2023? An Early Temperature Check on Growth and Hiring | CTO Craft

Redundancies in January 2023 totalled a third of the total layoffs in 2022. Here are our insights into the tech market one month into 2023.

CTO CraftHenry Draper Albany

Reads of the Week

Jade Rubick - Uplevel your managers with Mini-M support groups

A Mini-M is a group of managers that meet weekly or biweekly. The meeting is a combination support group and working session. I describe the practice.

Lazywillsubscribe

How to Improve Your Executive Presence to Have More Influence and Impact

Today on Asking for a Friend I interview Joel Garfinkle, Executive Coach and author, about executive presence for more impact and influence.

Let's Grow LeadersKarin Hurt

From our Sponsors

From YLD

A valuable tool for leaders managing large-scale, high-traffic applications.

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Unlock valuable insights - read the article

Thanks as always to all the amazing sponsors helping CTO Craft bring you resources like this newsletter, our events, community and more:

AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Google Cloud, iTechArt, Jellyfish, LinearB, Lohika, 101 Ways, O’Reilly, PGS Software, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, Swarmia, YLD

Culture & People

Skills Gap Analysis: How To Identify Key Skills To Meet Your Business Goals

How to run a skills gap analysis to determine your hiring and learning and development requirements.

People Managing PeoplePeople Managing People

My critique of “the Spotify Model”: Part 1

Part 2 here

MediumJason Yip

Can bossless management work?

Not according to B-school professors Nicolai Foss and Peter Klein, whose new book makes the case for functional hierarchy.

strategy+businessTheodore Kinni

Data Science Team Topologies

How data product development diverges from software

Towards Data ScienceMark Derdzinski

Embrace Mistakes to Build a Learning Culture | Ben Laker

Mistakes and critical incidents can serve as learning opportunities and help build a culture of growth and innovation.

MIT Sloan Management ReviewBen Laker

Leadership & Self Management

How I Lead 45 Direct Reports in Only Four Days a Week (with Four Fundamental Habits)

#2, Do the hard stuff

Management MattersAngelo Pollice

How to Stop Being Perceived as Negative at Work - Let’s Grow Leaders

If you are perceived as negative at work when you actually really care, here’s my top tip to change how your colleagues receive your ideas.

Let's Grow LeadersKarin Hurt

My typical tactics for influencing leaders at different levels

Originally presented at Agile Lean Ireland.

MediumJason Yip

Skills that make a big difference — Empathy

Becoming a Better Engineer — Part 2

The Cloud ArchitectAdrian Hornsby

What is a Fractional Executive? 20+ Leaders Share Examples, Pitfalls, and Benefits of Hiring One — Reforge

What is a fractional executive? How much do they cost? And should you consider such a role? This article walks through it all, pulling directly from the experience of experienced executives.

ReforgeDoa Jafri

Agile & Engineering

The Inevitable - Failures in Distributed Systems

Experiencing failure at scale is as the popular Marvel character Thanos would say “Inevitable”. Memory leaks, software or hardware or network I/O failures are just a few. It’s a problem of simple mathematics, the probability of failing rises as the total number of operations performed increases. Wit…

amanaman

Your Tech Stack Doesn’t Do What Everyone Needs It To. What Next?

Stack extensibility is an essential trait of well-designed IT ecosystems. Low-code BPA (Business Process Automation) has advantages that puts it at the forefront of approaches to stack extensibility. Learn how low-code software increases process resiliency by empowering business teams with an easy-t…

InfoQAlessio Alionco

How to Deliver a Fixed Scope, Fixed Date Project with Agile - SHIFT314

How to deliver a fixed scope, fixed date project with Agile and work with waterfall teams. Overcome typical Agile assumptions and beliefs.

SHIFT314Michael K Sahota

Investing Wisely in Architecture Through Refactoring

The stronger your refactoring skill, the more easily you can use architecture advice as guidelines instead of as rules to enforce. This makes it significantl...

The Code WhispererJ. B. Rainsberger

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:

https://techmanagerweekly.com

Have an amazing week!

Andy