Sign in Subscribe
7 min read

🦜 Eng Strategy, Agile on Trial, Complexity, Performance Reviews, Happy Engineers, "Intelligent" Cynicism, Renewing Energy: TMW #388

Our first US Mixer in Boston is coming up this Tuesday - are you in the area?

Hello again, welcome to the week!

This week sees our very first Mixer event in the USA, in Boston on July 9th at the Granary Tavern. If you're in the area, do come along and meet some other members of the CTO Craft community, along with some new faces, and share a beverage or two.

We're thrilled to announce our second keynote for CTO Craft Con: Berlin, will be Dr Nadja Schmiedl, CTO of United Robotics Group. Nadja will delve into the critical intersections of technology, regulation, and strategic growth on a global scale.

The CTO Craft community has been chatty this week! Among others, we've had in-depth conversations about...

  • Upskilling Engineering Managers
  • Managing technical and engineering risks
  • IP ownership when using contractors through platforms like Upwork
  • ISMS software
  • Visa sponsorship
  • Podman as an alternative to Docker

And a whole load more. If you're in a senior technology leadership role and haven't yet joined the free Slack community, drop us your details on this page.

That's it! See you next week

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Events

CTO Craft Con: Berlin | 24th - 25th September 2024
CTO Craft Con will bring together Chief Technology Officers and other senior technology leaders from the most exciting start-ups, scale-ups, unicorns, and big tech companies to elevate their engineering culture.
CTO Craft Con: Berlin 2024
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
CTO Craft Con London 2024pipctocraft
CTO Craft Mixer: Boston 2024
Join our community of CTOs and senior tech leaders for an informal meet-up in the Boston area.
CTO Craft Con London 2024Brooke Stead

Check out all of our upcoming Mixer events - is there one happening in your city?

Reads of the Week

Introducing MX - Management Experience™ - Yaniv Preiss
Management Experience™ - what is it and why should you care
Yaniv PreissYaniv Preiss
Book review: How Life Works
In the 1980s, the anthropologist Lucy Suchman studied how office workers interacted with sophisticated photocopiers. What she found was that people’s actions were not determined by predefined…
Surfing ComplexityLorin Hochstein

From our Sponsors

Generative AI survey - What's been said so far?

Just under two weeks ago, in partnership with Softwire, we launched a brand new survey to learn more about your use of AI. Have you ever wondered what tools your competitors are using? Or whether they are really seeing 3-4x productivity increases? Our survey is designed to find these answers, and more, by covering topics including competitive advantage, policies and training, and talent strategies. You can still have your say.

Check out the Survey

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

If you're interested in sponsoring TMW or any of our events, drop us a line at partners@ctocraft.com.

Leadership, Strategy & Business

You need to understand the business to design a good engineering strategy
Engineering Strategy driven by Business
Engineering StrategyAleix Morgadas
Leadership for Results and Peace of Mind
I deeply care about getting results. I like to see things improved. I also want to enjoy my work and like the people I work with to enjoy what they do. Plus, I like to have peace of mind every day. How do you get all three right most of the time, if not always? After years of testing various ideas and behaviors, I developed a leadership framework that has proven effective in achieving results, enjoying work, and maintaining peace of mind.
TBM 297: Staying In Touch
Hopefully, I’m back on the road to health and fitness, but I have let things slip since my son was born. In the before-times, I was obsessed with cycling. I had a GPS, heart rate monitor, power meter, and scale. I kept a digital training log with various metrics and used a specialized analytics tool to cut the data. I also kept a detailed training journal with qualitative observations (e.g., “woke up with a bit of calf tenderness” or “feeling positive about the season so far”). Once in a while, along with racing and training, I would do benchmark “tests”—all-out efforts at certain durations.
The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler
Complexity Anti-Patterns - Alex Martynov Blog
Photo by Ming Sun on Pexels In this blog, I want to offer an overview of the themes distilled from different literature that can be considered anti-patterns when we deal with complexity. This is intended as part one of a two-blog series. In the second one, I will share how the work of Carl Rogers …
Alex Martynov Blog

Culture, People & Teams

The Overlooked Aspects of Successful Development Teams
How to nurture successful attitudes into your culture
đź”® Crafting Tech TeamsDenis ÄŚahuk
Hot Take Alert #11: Performance Reviews
What can we do about this largely broken system?
The FishmanAF NewsletterAdam Fishman
Happy people make better products - Stack Overflow
Stack OverflowEira May
Build Your Culture Like a Product — Lessons from Asana’s Head of People
Anna Binder, Asana’s Head of People and the company’s first HR hire, shares her step-by-step approach to intentionally building the company culture.
First Round ReviewFirst Round Staff

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Agile on Trial
The Case That’s Shaking the Tech World
Serious ScrumSjoerd Nijland
A Eulogy for DevOps
The DevOps movement has died out. What went wrong?
LogoMathew Duggan
Read the newest State of AI report | Retool Blog | Cache
Learn how developers are building AI apps with real ROI and get insights on tools like vector databases, LLMs, and inference platforms in this report.
Cache
RDEL #49: What are common anti-patterns in code review comments?
This week we look at the prevalence and severity of various anti-patterns in code review comments.
Research-Driven Engineering LeadershipLizzie Matusov

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Daniel Pink: Don’t be deceived by the “intelligent” voice of cynicism - Work Life by Atlassian
Too many people can get distracted by the illusion that the strong negative voice is the right one to listen to. Learn how to evaluate ideas at work from a balanced perspective rather than jumping to conclusions.
Work Life by AtlassianNatalie Mendes
Ashamed (Burnout Part 5)
The High Achiever’s Guide to Battling Burnout and Finding Balance
Notes in the MarginsLeah Farmer
Making a Habit of Making Great Habits
Your habits govern your life. Most of your behaviors are the results of habits. They are often involuntary, and you usually don’t recognize…
Management MattersRob Wiest
Time is Finite, Energy Isn’t: Figure Out How to Renew Your Energy to Avoid Burnout
Burnout can manifest as a lack of focus, irritability, isolation, and chronic fatigue. So, how do you avoid burnout?
Atomic SpinAlyssa Abbate

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

Published by:

Andy Skipper