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🌻 Rewrite Traps, Psychological Safety, Good Goals, Strategy Debugging, NIHS, Uptime Guarantees, Worry Burnout: TMW #329

Hi there, welcome to the week

If, like the CTO Craft team, you're based in the UK, chances are you're enjoying one of the several bank holidays in May today - this week's is for May Day, next week is a bonus day off for the King's coronation. Whatever you're up to, hopefully you're getting a chance to refresh and reset.

This week's issue is a bumper one, as you'll see below, but our takeaways from O'Reilly's Tech Trends Report is especially worth checking out - it's pleasing to see L&D increasing in importance, for example. What are you doing with L&D, and how are you building the culture within your teams to be more explicitly open to professional growth?

On with the links - enjoy, and see you next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

Registration | CTO Craft Con London 2023
CTO Craft Con: Recordings Only £199 +VAT Access to the recordings of all sessions post event Recordings Only Pass We are sold out! We are sold out of attendee passes for the first CTO Craft Con! We now have a waiting list in place in the event of cancel…
CTO Craft Con London 2023
Conference Speaker Spotlight Q&A with VP of Engineering, Accurx, Christian Wong | CTO Craft
Christian Wong, VP of Engineering, Accurx, has also been Director Of Engineering at Bumble Dating and Head of Core Services at Zopa. At our CTO Craft Conference, he’ll be part of the panel discussion: Panel Discussion: Self Care as Technology Leaders – Building Resilience to Stress and Improving Wel…
CTO CraftAndy Skipper

Reads of the Week

Key takeaways from O’Reilly’s 2023 Tech Trends Report | CTO Craft
Read about the latest tech trends to guide where tech is heading in 2023 and see what teams are learning to help you prepare for what’s next.
CTO CraftOReilly
Avoiding the Rewrite Trap
A common challenge for engineering leaders looks something like this:
MediumCamille Fournier
Here are 5 Proven Practices to Boost Psychological Safety - Blog
Breadcrumbs list
Corporate Rebels

CTO Craft Bytes

CTO Craft Bytes: Empathetic Leadership
At this CTO Craft Bytes event, we’re joined by Jeanne Cordisco, Chief People Officer at O’Reilly for a fireside chat.
Eventbrite

From our Sponsors

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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, Uplevel, YLD

Leadership, Strategy & Business

How Do I Lead My Team without Strategic Direction from the Top?
A leader must learn how he can enhance his team’s impact, despite conflicting organizational priorities.
Harvard Business Review
TBM 216: Good Goals/Bad Goals
What makes a good goal? Most of us have heard of “SMART goals” (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound), but in my experience, SMART is only the tip of the iceberg. OKRs, to their benefit, seek to encourage some positive goal-setting habits, but ultimately they are still goals.
The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler
Ten Attributes Of A Great Manager
To become a great manager, your most important attribute is not winning awards or recognition. It’s about the journey.
Management MattersDrake’s Sales Improvement
OKRs as a strategy debugger (& sandwich maker) - Allan Kelly
OKRs should reflect company missions and strategy. If they don’t that is a symptom not a problem. As in debugging the OKR needs fixing but so too does the cause
Allan Kelly - Growing Effective digital enterprises with agile and OKRsallan kelly
Lessons learned from being a CTPO
I recently completed my first role as a Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO). As the position becomes increasingly common, I wanted…
The CTPO BlogAlexander Grosse

Culture, People & Teams

Three Ways to Gain Visibility into Indirectly Managed Teams
How do you have visibility to what matters especially when you manage from 2 or more layers away?
Effective Software LeadsJames Samuel
Why Big Tech layoffs haven’t made your tech hiring (much) easier - Technical.ly
With Big Tech in retreat, now is when we see what companies really are market leaders.
Technically MediaChristopher Wink
The Corporate Rebels Handbook Series: Conflict Resolution - Blog
Breadcrumbs list
Corporate Rebels
Barriers to Change: Not Invented Here Syndrome - NOBL Academy
Automatically rejecting ideas from the “outside” wastes time and energy that could be spent on desperately needed change
NOBL AcademyName

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Uptime Guarantees — A Pragmatic Perspective
Engineers won’t tell you this. It’s not how they think. They love working on nice juicy problems, and being able to put them on their CVs. 💡 Engineering for 99.5% uptime is more cost-effective than 99.99% for most startups! “But why shouldn’t my engineers strive for excellence?” They should, but 99…
Are Developers Needed in the Age of AI? | Hups
What does the rise of generative AI mean for Development teams?
Hups
What Is a User Story Template and Why Does It Work So Well?
The most popular way of writing user stories is with a three-part user story template that answers the questions Who, What, and Why.
Mountain Goat SoftwareMike Cohn
Agility and Architecture
Software architecture and agility are often portrayed as incompatible. In reality, they are mutually reinforcing - a sound architecture helps teams build better solutions in a series of short intervals, and gradually evolving a system’s architecture helps by validating and improving it over time.
InfoQKurt Bittner
Systems design 2: What we hope we know
Someone asked if I could write about the rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) and what I think that means for the future of people, t…
apenwarr

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Stress-free start: expert strategies to conquer new job anxiety | Welcome to the Jungle
Learn how to tackle new job stress with expert tips on preparation, communication, and maintaining a positive, realistic mindset.
Welcome to the JungleWelcome to the Jungle
How to memorize any information by active learning
“There’s no such thing as a good memory or a bad memory, there’s only a trained memory and an untrained memory”
MediumMary Mpembee
Worry burnout, or when too much worry leaves you exhausted and overwhelmed
PARIS, April 29 — Do you feel overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted by a state of anxiety that’s not just related to your work? Then you might be suffering from what experts…
Malay MailMalay Mail
Stop Blaming Others, take responsibility.
Why do we keep blaming others when we fail? Why do we tend to find an excuse? How can we fix this?
MediumYalım

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy

Published by:

Andy Skipper