🍹 Skip Levels, Manipulating Managers, Leadership OKRs, Transactive Memory, Staying Technical, Claude, Tiny Demons: TMW #404

Sorry, this issue of Tech Manager Weekly could not be found...

Hello, just kidding! Welcome to issue #404

A huge thanks to everyone who submitted a talk for CTO Craft Con: London 2025 - the Call for Papers is now closed, and we have over 160 talks and presentations to run through in the coming weeks. Tickets are already flying out, and the agenda is coming together quickly. The first speakers are already live on the conference site, and more will be announced next week.

If you'd like to join us, don't forget to use the community code to access discounted Super Early Bird tickets: Community-Spring-25

That's it, on with the links, see you next week

Andy @ CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

Jade Rubick - Why and how to do skip level 1-1s

I share what I’ve learned about doing skip level 1-1s.

Lazywilladvise startups

How to flub (and not flub) group decision-making on technical teams

This post from a week ago talked about three decision-making traps that technical leaders fall into like flies into a honey jar: They’ll solve for the general case without collecting or considering…

Chelsea TroyView all posts by Chelsea

Ditch the Ratings, Keep the rigor

Unbundling Performance Evaluations with Yes/No Questions

Org HackingItamar Goldminz

CTO Craft Events

Join Us for an Evening of Networking, Insight & the CTO Craft Community!

📅 13th November
📍 Clerkenwell, London

Connect with London’s CTO Craft community for a night of networking, conversations, and shared experiences over drinks and food. This is the perfect chance to meet fellow tech leaders, make connections, and gain insights to support your growth journey.

This is free to attend for all tech leaders.

Register now!

CTO Craft Con: London 2025

CTO Craft Con will bring together over 500 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 in London, March 2025.

CTO Craft Con London 2025

CTO Craft Mixer: Toronto 2024

Join our community of CTOs and senior tech leaders for an informal meet-up in the Toronto area.

CTO Craft

Leadership, Strategy & Business

TBM 316: Ultra Founder Mode

Founder Mode is a joke. It’s for the weak. You want the truth? Founder Mode is pure delusion—a comfortable lie for those too scared to go all in. You want to level up? This is Ultra Founder Mode, where the intensity never drops, the pressure never lets up, and excuses are obliterated.

The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler

How to Win Arguments and Manipulate Managers

Make your spreadsheets shape strategy

Evan Armstrong

Charting a course for leading an effective organisation - Work Life by Atlassian

Learn seven key traits of an effective organisation and explore enterprise-level success stories of leveraging Atlassian solutions

Work Life by AtlassianRyan Narragon

How to write OKRs for leadership work

Can your vision and strategy work have an OKR? Should it? What about the rest of leadership work? The answer is yes. Here’s how to do it.

Jeff GothelfJeff Gothelf

Culture, People & Teams

How To Ruin an Engineering Organization

Some of the best leaders I’ve worked with told me they’ve spent years observing things in their work. As part of their growth, they were mindful and took notes. Specifically, notes of the kind of “…

Aviv Ben-Yosef

The role of Transactive Memory Systems in great teams

While researching for a talk, I came across a term that was new to me but summed up something I had seen and gave me language to describe it. That team was the Transactive Memory System. This post talks about what it is, why it’s important and some tactics to help build it.

Emily WebberEmily Webber

Software Engineer Titles Have (Almost) Lost All Their Meaning

Examining the Devaluation of Software Engineer Titles and Its Impact on Tech Industry Integrity

Trevor I. LasnTrevor I. Lasn

A Culture of Good Decision-Making (Part 2) - Itamar Gilad

Decisions don’t have to be hard and rife with politics and debate. Here are some powerful techniques to help you decide faster and better

Itamar GiladItamar Gilad

Technology, Operations & Delivery

How to use engineering metrics for the success of engineers and teams

Measuring the right things ensures that we inspire the right actions!

Engineering LeadershipGregor Ojstersek

3 Things I Learned From My “Stay Technical” Project

Like a lot of people, the pandemic made me feel like I needed a project — if I couldn’t leave the house, at least I could reserve a weird…

MediumNick Rockwell

Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week

I’m a huge fan of Claude’s Artifacts feature, which lets you prompt Claude to create an interactive Single Page App (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and then view the result …

How to create a shared vocabulary in a tech organization

Do you struggle with communication between your tech & non-tech employees? You may need to create a shared vocabulary. Mindler’s VP of Engineering explains.

The Software HouseJakub Piłucki

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

How to Make Friends with Fear: The F.E.A.R. Framework

By Feeling your fear, Examining its source, Articulating your needs, and Reflecting on the experience, you can transform this natural response into a powerful driver of personal and professional progress. Learn about the F.E.A.R. Framework.

Ness LabsAnne-Laure Le Cunff

From Struggle to Insight

Creating the conditions to make sense of what’s happening

Human-Centric EngineeringJohn Durrant

Tiny Demons

Surface and work with your fears, doubts, and worries through playful drawings and conversations

The LiberatorsBarry Overeem

Should I stay or should I go? Great song, lousy career strategy

I often found myself pondering about leaving a job, and many of the people I work with are battling with the same dilemma. Let’s explore my recommended approach to thinking about it rationally.

Sudo Make Me a CTOSergio Visinoni

About our Sponsors

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, Damilah, DoIT, Google Cloud, Jellyfish, LANSA, Plandek, Skiller Whale, Softwire, Sema, Uplevel, Vention, YLD

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

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