🚴‍♂️ Goals vs Plans, Prioritising Assumptions, Cost of Work, Empathy, Crowdstrike Lessons, Error Backlogs, Healing from Burnout: TMW #394

Hello again, it's Monday!

It's been amazing chatting to all the new applicants for our very popular Mentoring Circles, and one topic which comes up again and again is burnout. The state of having burned through all your personal resources while shouldering huge amounts of pressure and stress is all too common in the engineering leadership world, especially in the first few senior-level roles in your career.

Burnout can happen when you continue absorbing more and more work-related stress without ensuring you have the right balance in place, but it can also come about from loneliness, lack of support, poor delegation skills and a general understanding of what being a senior leader actually requires of you - and what it doesn't. It's no joke - burning out completely can mean having to take lengthy career breaks, worsening relationships with your loved ones, as well as real physical issues like headaches, muscular and skeletal problems, and many more.

We'd like to know about you, dear reader, and your experience with burnout - if you have any! Here's a very simple poll:

If you are struggling with work-related stress and pressure, always feel free to reach out to me or the CTO Craft team. We've helped hundreds of leaders who are struggling with these issues, and we'd love to support you if you need help. We're right here.

That's it, let's look at some links... Until next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

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Reads of the Week

How We Can Stop Confusing Long Term Goals with Short Term Plans - Johanna Rothman

Several of my clients want to plan the product roadmap and then “work to the plan.” They think the roadmap is the long-term goal. But roadmaps aren’t goals. Instead, they are tactics for achieving a long-term goal. That means we need long-term goals based on both the corporate strategy and each product’s strategy. Those are two […]

Johanna RothmanJohanna

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Leadership, Strategy & Business

Stop “Manage by Exception” - Yaniv Preiss

What is Manage by Exception? Why you should stop it?

Yaniv PreissYaniv Preiss

Assumption Prioritization Canvas: How to Identify And Test The Right Assumptions

You can’t test everything. And you can’t test what you’re unaware of.

The Product CompassPaweł Huryn

Improving real-time enterprise visibility into the cost of work - Work Life by Atlassian

Atlassian Platinum Solutions partner Praecipio share how they help customers understand the real-time cost of work.

Work Life by AtlassianAtlassian

My Next Word to Retire is ‘Prioritization’

I’ve been studiously avoiding the term MVP (not the concept, but the acronym) since at least 2020, since it causes endless confusion. It originally identified the leanest-possible learning experiments. Then it morphed into “revenue products we can sell for money sooner.” Then into shorthand for “just get v1.0

Rich Mironov's Product BytesRichard Mironov

Culture, People & Teams

How to build a high-performance culture without culling the herd

The annual layoff cycle perpetuates only one thing - mediocrity. Here are 3 ways to break that cycle and build better cultures.

Jeff GothelfJeff Gothelf

Empathy is a superpower in the engineering industry

I value this skill a LOT more than pure technical skills in my teams!

Engineering LeadershipGregor Ojstersek

11 Interview Mistakes that Cost You Great Candidates

Don’t make these common interview mistakes if you want to hire the best candidates. An interview is your first impression. Make it a good one!

Lighthouse - Blog About Leadership & Management AdviceJason Evanish

Kickstart Your New Hire’s Success by Connecting them to the Right People

As a manager, onboarding a new hire isn’t just about providing manuals and login information, it’s about setting the employee up to operate autonomously in their role and feel comfortable within the organization. To do this, leaders need to emphasize the importance of developing strategic relationships with colleagues across the company who can share critical knowledge, and help contextualize and speed up their learning. There are three keys ways managers can help employees engage in internal networking, and thus boost their productivity, sense of belonging, engagement, and retention: 1) Create a knowledge map that shows who knows what within the company; 2) Create a prioritized networking list of people they should meet and why; and 3) Initiate relationship building to facilitate connections for your new employee.

Harvard Business ReviewJulia Phelan

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Lessons from CrowdStrike: Striking the right balance to reduce risk and maximize resilience

After CrowdStrike, how can organizations strike the right balance to managing risk?

ThoughtworksMax Griffiths

Putting a meaningful dent in your error backlog

We often don’t realize how noisy the errors have gotten until things are already well out of hand. After all, we’ve got shit to do. Deadlines to hit. By the time we decide to get seriou…

Dan SlimmonDan Slimmon

How Scrum Masters (and Managers) Go Astray By Committing to Plans

I’ve found only one sane thing to commit to in product.

Management MattersTodd Lankford

Destroy on Friday: The Big Day 🧨 A Chaos Engineering Experiment - Part 2

In part two of Lex’s blog series, we find out: How did our chaos engineering test go? Did our customers experience downtime or latency?

HoneycombLex Neva

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

How Long Does it Take to Heal From Work Burnout?

Burnout isn’t new and burnout recovery isn’t easy. According to new research from Future Forum, workplace stress has resulted in an…

CalendarJohn Rampton

Derisking 101: How to identify and reduce risk in your daily work

Train yourself to sense what could go wrong--while you can still shape the outcome. Ask yourself these two simple questions.

Wes Kao's NewsletterWes Kao

How GitHub supports neurodiverse employees (and how your company can, too)

Teams with neurodivergent employees can be up to 30 percent more productive. Discover tips on how best to support them in your workplace.

The GitHub BlogLou Nelson, Owen Niblock

On Belonging and Boundaries: Time-Outs, Team Meetings, and Emotional Maturity

We all want more support, compassion, and belonging at work. This requires expressing and respecting emotions. But it can backfire if one…

MediumCarin-Isabel Knoop (on Humans in the Digital Era)

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

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Have an amazing week!

Andy