8 min read

🥦 High Performers, Ego in Leadership, Gut Feeling, Squads, Late Projects, Slack, Focus, Ikigai: TMW #380

CTO Craft Con roundup, new events, and all the reading material you need this week
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Thanks to Unblocked for sponsoring this issue of Tech Manager Weekly - helpful and accurate answers to your development team's questions about the codebase

Hello there! Welcome to the week

The CTO Craft team is back home and catching our breaths after a phenomenal couple of days in London hosting CTO Craft Con. Over 400 leaders joined us to see some of the world's best CTOs walk us through some of their learnings, join in-depth roundtables and chat with other leaders facing the same challenges as them. We've had an amazing time, and we hope you all have too!

In particular, the new addition of Roundtables was a huge hit - every session was standing-room only. We've taken that on board, and we're already planning some new events focused entirely on getting you sitting around a table digging deep into some technology and leadership topics. Keep an eye on the Events section below for more info.

At the event, we also announced the next conference, which will be in Berlin this September. You can pre-register for tickets below, as well as checking out some of our city-based Mixer events.

What other events do you think CTO Craft should run?

Andy @ CTO Craft

PS: Don't forget to check out the results of our CTO Compensation Survey! How does your package compare to others in your region...?

CTO Craft Events

CTO Craft Roundtables: London
Welcome to the launch of our newest event: CTO Craft Roundtables! Join us for a half-day of engaging discussions and networking opportunities designed specifically for CTOs and engineering leaders
Coming Soon | CTO Craft Con: Berlin 2024
CTO Craft Con: Berlin 24th – 25th September 2024 | Berlin Crafting the Future of Technology Leadership CALL FOR SPEAKERS PRE-REGISTER BECOME A PARTNER Hot off the success of CTO Craft Con: London, we’re thrilled to unveil our next venture… CTO Craft Con: Berlin! After the triumphant debut of our CTO Craft Mixers in the heart of Germany’s capital, we’re excited to bring the complete CTO Craft Con experience to Berlin. Join us as we gather CTOs and emerging tech leaders from startups, scaleups, soonicorns, unicorns, big tech, and beyond to address the most pressing challenges of our industry in a secure, collaborative, and inclusive peer-to-peer setting. We will have more information to share very soon, pre-register today to be among the first notified when tickets become available. Pre-Register Confirmed Speakers Include: Füsun Wehrmann CTO InPost Deepak Kumur CTO Seven.One Entertainment Group Vira Tkachenko CTO MacPaw Hizam Sahibudeen CTO Shipmunk Ravneet Shah CTO Allica Bank André Neubauer CTO Trusted Shops Mathilde Lemée CTO JOLIMOI David Gebhardt CTO mobile.de Olga Khorkova Head of IT HORIZN STUDIOS Natasha Dimban Board Member L’Observatoire de la Fintech Claus Höfele Director of Engineering On Words from our community… Other events from CTO Craft VIEW ALL EVENTS
CTO Craft Mixer: Manchester 2024
Join our community of CTOs and senior tech leaders for an informal meet-up in Manchester.

See all our amazing upcoming events: https://events.ctocraft.com/

Reads of the Week

Communication, high performers and keeping up with the expectations.
How do I manage high performers? The answer is simple — you don’t! These types of people need rock-solid communication, a good framework…
Where to Start with Strategy?
Focus on Betterment

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A huge thanks to all our sponsors and partners, who make Tech Manager Weekly and the CTO Craft community possible:

AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Coherence, HeadChannel, Google Cloud, Jellyfish, Polly, Skiller Whale, Softwire, Sema, Unblocked, Uplevel, Vention, YLD, 101 Ways

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Ego in Leadership
Should you always suppress it?
Is gut feeling inherently bad? - Crisp’s Blog
Gut feeling. The sensation you get when you have a hunch. You know what to do. Is that hunch good or bad? Should you push it to the side or should you embrace it? Let’s explore these questions.
How to be a great team player
The not-so-complicated ways to level up your peers and take your engineering team from good to great.
7 ways leaders cripple their organization by destroying trust
Or how to avoid this from happening
5 Awesome Quotes From Carl Jung That Will Help Make You a Better Leader
Steal some wisdom from the ages

Culture, People & Teams

Managing High Performers
The first rule of managing high performers is that you must manage them.
The Anatomy of a Successful Team Squad
What I Learned from My Recent Experiment with the Spotify Squad Model
Staying on Top of Slack
Chat tools like Slack feel more real-time, so it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the messages, so read how to stay on top of Slack.
Working with others is different from working.
Today, I’m working on our new deck. It’s a little uncomfortable, because there’s no furniture. I’m sitting on a blanket. The furniture is in the yard, being spray-painted. B…

Technology, Operations & Delivery

#1 Reason Even Agile Projects Are Late
Ever wonder why your projects always seem to be late, even with an agile framework like Scrum? The reason might surprise you.
Building the Slack MVP
As we got started committing ideas to code, we already knew the utilitarian aspects of Slack would work — our own team had proven it through years of use. IRC and other chat apps had dedicated followings. It was clear that Channels and DMs with integrated files and search worked better
Pairing With AI: A Senior Developer’s Journey Building a Plugin
James Ramirez shares his experience using ChatGPT to learn Go, navigate the Kolide API, and build a sophisticated Steampipe plugin.

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Why can’t I focus?
Being able to focus, to do deep, meaningful work is a key skill for engineering leaders. Yet, oftentimes it seems hard to maintain a sustained high concentration level. I thought about my experiences when I struggled with this, and listed a few reasons I might have had trouble maintaining focus.
Using Ikigai with Personal OKRs
Finding and achieving the right goals in life isn’t easy. You may feel pulled in multiple directions and struggle to find a purpose that aligns with your values and aspirations. This is where the J…
Managing Stress and Fostering Creativity in Your Startup Team
As a manager at a startup, you know that stress and creativity are intertwined. While a moderate amount of stress can be motivating, unchecked stress can stifle …
The Power of Mental Strength and Fortitude in Leadership
Are you looking for practical ways to implement mental strength, and stay calm under pressure? Don’t miss this Asking For A Friend.

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