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8 min read

🐅 Cargo Culting, Being Strategic, Retention, Facilitation, Software Moves Forward, Luck Surface Area, Seasonal Overwhelm: TMW #406

Plus performance review survey results...

Hello again, it's Monday! Welcome to the week

Today we're excited to share a first-look of the CTO Craft Con: London agenda! We'll be returning to the QEII Centre, London on the 10th-11th March with an event that is designed to go beyond the standard conference experience and dive into the real challenges you face every day as a tech leader. Take a look at the agenda featuring our brand new Conversations track here:

https://conference.ctocraft.com/london-2025/agenda-preview/

There are now just 25% of super early bird tickets remaining, secure yours today using access code "Community-Spring-25" to enable member pricing:

https://conference.ctocraft.com/london-2025/ticket-types/

The results of last week's survey about performance reviews was fairly eye-opening - as you'll see below, 65% of all respondents were neutral or dissatisfied with their current approaches. We'd love to know more - what's not working, and what are the negative effects you're experiencing from the current process? Drop us a reply 😊

OK, on with the links - see you next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Events

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 Bytes: Scaling Pains: Navigating the Ups and Downs of Growth
The secret to scaling up and down seamlessly: A three-pronged strategy
CTO Craft

Psssst - we have lots of local Mixer events coming up, including ones in Edinburgh, Paris, Boston, Goteborg, Manchester and Bristol in November.. Would you like to run one in your city? Drop us a line

Reads of the Week

Cargo culting
How value dominance, shallow understanding, and imitation hurts software, systems, and organizations
Alex Ewerlöf NotesAlex Ewerlöf
An alternative to OKRs: How to set and achieve ambitious goals
Strategy & roadmapping is hard, but the most common failure mode for teams is execution. Teams often know where they want to go in the long-term, but struggle to get there. In this post, we discuss why goal setting is so hard and how to more consistently set and achieve ambitious goals.
Ravi Mehta | Product LeadershipRavi Mehta

From our Sponsors

[Webinar] Low-code can help slash development costs.

Join our webinar on November 12 to explore how Visual LANSA’s professional low-code can help slash development costs, tackle developer shortages, and drive innovation.

Register now!

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.

Leadership, Strategy & Business

When You’re Told You’re Not Strategic Enough
Being told you’re not strategic enough can be frustrating. If your strategy isn’t seen and understood, it’s as if it doesn’t exist at all. By making your strategy visible and easy to understand through storytelling, leveraging existing frameworks, and ensuring ongoing communication with stakeholders, you can shift perceptions, align your team with long-term goals, and be recognized for your strategic approach. Crises and day-to-day pressures should not get in the way of your strategic thinking; instead, use these moments to demonstrate your foresight and ability to connect immediate actions to the bigger picture. When the strategy is seen, understood, and actionable, success follows.
Harvard Business ReviewLuis Velasquez
TBM 320: From Fluffy Concepts to Concrete Outcomes & Behaviors
In product, we’re bombarded by high-level concepts like empowerment, data-driven, product-led, customer-focused, accountability, getting into the details, and high agency. But teams have trouble putting these ideas into practice. Why? And what can you do about it?
The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler
Interview with Cate Huston, author of The Engineering Leader
I recently got to know the author of one of my favorite books in 2024, and discovered we have similar views on many topics. Discover her journey in today’s article.
Sudo Make Me a CTOSergio Visinoni
An engineering strategy requires context specific metrics
As part of my Design and execute an engineering strategy blog series, I didn’t emphasize enough the importance of metrics, and which role they play.
Engineering StrategyAleix Morgadas

Culture, People & Teams

Psychological Safety vs. High Standards: A Misunderstood Dynamic
The term “psychological safety” is often misleading. When managers hear safety, many dismiss it as a soft style that implies complacency. Meanwhile, psychology implies too much mumbo jumbo. High-profile figures like Elon Musk advocating for a “hardcore” style perpetuate this misconception. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship
Leading SapiensSheril Mathews
Retention and resilience - Matt Spitz
software engineering musings
Matt SpitzMatt Spitz
M-Shaped Engineers: The Future of Software
Why Engineers With Diverse Skills Will Lead the Future of Tech
Management MattersKrzysztof Jamroz
5 Superpowers Every Facilitator Needs
Being a facilitator isn’t about having all the answers or being the smartest person in the room; it’s about decentering yourself to help

MediumJackie Colburn

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Why software only moves forward | Swizec Teller
At scale there are no rollbacks and no cut-overs. Your software only moves forward.
Swizec Teller
Methodology is bullshit: principles for product velocity | SSOReady
Building the right thing shouldn’t take very long -- doing away with nonsense makes product development really fast”
SSOReady
Software Buying Guide for Smaller Teams
A mental framework and a no non-sense guide to buying softwares for your organisation.
About scaling engineering teams and large codebasesShubham Gupta
Programmer Collaboration Styles
In software development, two collaboration styles have proven to be most effective.
Rethinking SoftwareAdam Ard

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

A case for prioritising your Luck Surface Area
The how and why of engineering more luck and opportunities into your life
Human-Centric EngineeringSimon Holmes
Research-Based Advice for the Seasonally Overwhelmed and Schedule Challenged
With summer over and the year’s end approaching, it’s easy to let thoughts of unfinished projects and unmet goals spiral. Joseph Fuller, Christina Wallace, and Kathleen McGinn recommend these research-based approaches to help people balance their personal and professional demands.
HBS Working Knowledge
Winter Wellness in the Workplace: How to Keep Health & Happiness Thriving During the Cold Months | HR C-Suite - Connect Workforce Strategies for Business Results
HR C-Suite - Connect Workforce Strategies for Business ResultsTresha Moreland
3 Ways to Temper Your Hypervigilance at Work
Hypervigilance is a heightened state of awareness — your brain’s way of protecting you by scanning the environment for signs of danger. This behavior can be triggered by physical, mental, or psychological conditions, as well as social and familial situations such as childhood trauma, racial discrimination, and war. While there are valid reasons your brain has developed this mechanism to keep you safe, it can hinder your abilities at work. This can lead to “scanning” behavior: being quick to react to threats — real or imagined — in ways that prove to be counterproductive. Managing this scanning is key to breaking out of habitual patterns to become a more effective leader and teammate. You can do this in three key ways: getting curious before getting confrontational, choosing alternate paths of interpretation, and creating a soothing environment to relax your nervous system.
Harvard Business ReviewTanvi Gautam

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