7 min read

đź“ş Engineering Impact, Accountability, Helicopter Management, Goodbye S.M.A.R.T, 85% Effort, Levelling, Incidents, Values: TMW #337

Hello there! It's Monday

Thank you so much to everybody who's submitted their talk ideas in our Call for Papers for the next CTO Craft Con in November - if you're in the Slack community you'll have already seen that we're doubling the number of open slots for talks submitted through the CfP process, so if you're interested in presenting in London in November, here's your chance:

Submit your talk ideas here

The agenda for the November conference is coming together nicely, focused on Culture - there'll be sessions on everything from conflict resolution to diversity to psychological safety to communication styles. It's going to be absolutely unmissable. You can pre-register to be the first to hear when tickets go on sale here.

Are you based near Manchester, UK? If so, we hope you can join us for the first CTO Craft Bytes in Manchester, at the Old Monkey on July 5th - this first one will be an informal get-together, so join us for drinks and networking. The link to RSVP is below.

Last thing - you'll notice a new section below, CTO Craft Bytes - ICYMI, where we'll be linking the previous week's Bytes recording for you to catch up on whenever's good for you.

That's it, on with the links! Until next time

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Bytes: A CTO’s Guide to Communicating the Impact of Engineering
At this CTO Craft Bytes we’re partnered with Jellyfish to bring you this guide on effectively communicating the impact of engineering.
CTO Craft Bytes - Manchester Town Hall
Join us for our first ever in-person event in Manchester! Network at The Old Monkey pub with fellow members of the CTO Craft Community
Meet the CTO Craft coach, Robbie Clutton | CTO Craft
CTO Craft Coach and engineering leader Robbie discusses the impact of leadership coaching, building trust and being an Arsenal ballboy.

CTO Craft Bytes - ICYMI

CTO Craft Bytes: Using Big Picture Measures to Effect Positive Change
Register now for CTO Craft Bytes: Using Big Picture Measures to Effect Positive Change on crowdcast, scheduled to go live on June 23, 2023, 12:30 PM GMT+1.

Reads of the Week

Atlas: An Interactive Guide to Europe’s Technical Talent
Sequoia Atlas is an interactive guide to Europe’s hubs of technical talent. Explore talent volume or talent density across 14 engineering skillsets.
Accountability for Effective Teams
Accountability is about performance and behavior. Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage Accountability for measurable outcomes is “not the most important kind.” It’s the easy kind. The kind [of accountab…

From our Sponsors

[From Code Climate] NYC Engineering Leadership Meetup on July 20th

On July 20th in NYC, attend an interactive event for engineering leaders featuring a fireside chat with experts James McGill of Code Climate and Emily Nakashima of Honeycomb.

Register for Free

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, Vention, Jellyfish, LinearB, 101 Ways, O’Reilly, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, Swarmia, Uplevel, YLD

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Helicopter Management and Other Mistakes
You are a freshly minted manager. You come full of rage and frustration at the poor management you’ve endured and witnessed in tech, and you are god damn determined not to repeat all of those mista…
Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops
Talk transcript on various patterns that slowly influence how teams deal with reliability, and highlight some of the key interactions and behaviors I keep finding work well in the organizations I’ve been part of.
Barriers to Change: Misalignment - NOBL Academy
If you can’t get your most experienced leaders aligned on a change, what hope does the rest of the organization have?
It’s Time to Get Rid of S.M.A.R.T. Goals. Here’s Why & How
In my work with hundreds of managers each year, I mostly see poorly designed goals--typically leveraging S.M.A.R.T) and a wholesale lack of managerial coaching for goal achievement.

Culture, People & Teams

To Build a Top Performing Team, Ask for 85% Effort
An outdated way of thinking about peak performance is: “maximum effort = maximum results.” But research shows that it doesn’t actually work that way in reality. Here’s what actually works: The 85% rule, which counterintuitively suggests that to reach maximum output, you need to refrain from giving m…
Developer experience: What is it and why should you care? | The GitHub Blog
Explore how investing in a better developer experience frees developers to do what matters most: building great software.
The best teams I’ve worked with - Alessandro Diaferia
The best teams: autonomy, customer focus & continuous improvement. Empowerment, minimal management, adaptability, and effective leadership
On levelling, learning and development
“It takes 1,000 days to forge the spirit and 10,000 days to polish it.” - Miyamoto Musashi, 17th century samurai Recently I’ve been having a few conversations with newer, growing companies about career development frameworks. Before diving into any ins and outs of such a framework I first want to to…

Technology, Operations & Delivery

How we fixed our on call process to avoid engineer burnout
Ensuring that Intercom has great uptime requires a rapid response when things go wrong. This is how we developed an effective, sustainable on-call engineering process.
How To Be An Engineer That PMs Don’t Hate
We’ve talked about How To Be A PM That Engineers Don’t Hate, now let’s talk about it in the other direction.
Howie: The Post-Incident Guide
Read a detailed explanation of how to get the most out of your incidents, developed by a number of leading experts in the field, in what we affectionately call our process at, “how we got here process” (or “Howie” for short).
Backlog Refinement Cards - DZone
In the landscape of Agile software development, backlog refinement stands as a cornerstone of project success. This process, which involves the prioritization, often estimation and decomposition of work into manageable pieces, is fundamental for effective sprint planning and efficient project execut…

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Technological Solutions for Combating Depression and Anxiety | HackerNoon
Tech innovators continue to develop solutions that address specific gaps in the treatment pipeline.
Values Navigator: Discover your personal values with this quick quiz
Try this interactive quiz and downloadable worksheet to identify and prioritize your personal values.

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