🍍 Fake Deadlines, Managing Up, SLOs, Creating Joy, Holiday On-Call, Trunk-Based Development, Trauma: TMW #411

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

As 2024 comes to a close, we're reflecting on an incredible year for the CTO Craft Events team and our vibrant community. Your support—whether as an attendee, speaker, or sponsor—has been at the heart of every success this year.

Looking ahead, 2025 promises even more excitement! CTO Craft Con: London (10th-11th March) is booking up fast, with Early Bird rates ending after the festive break—secure your spot now with code Community-Spring-25.

We’re also thrilled to announce CTO Craft Con: Toronto, marking our North American debut. Early Bird tickets are available at just $549, unlockable with code Community-Toronto-25.

We can't wait to see you in 2025!

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 Con: Toronto 2025

CTO Craft Con will bring together over 200 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 Toronto, 2025.

CTO Craft Con: Toronto 2025

Free networking Mixers for tech leaders near you | CTO Craft

Join dozens of other CTOs and technology leaders in a relaxed environment for networking, chat, ideas, feedback and drinks.

CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

The DX Core 4 Framework

The next iteration of developer metrics

Fish Food for ThoughtMike Fisher

Using fake deadlines without driving your engineers crazy

The 5 most common mistakes of managers and how to avoid them

Leading DevelopersAnton Zaides

From our Sponsors

[From Damilah] How to select the right near-shore partner – and minimise your risks

Identifying risks and solutions when choosing the perfect near-shore partner for your business.

Read the article

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, 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

My one sentence guide to managing up

What every boss wants from their reports

Management for AnarchistsRafe Colburn

A Framework for Developing Service-Level Objectives

SLOs are reliability goals for products to achieve in order to keep users happy. Here, we go through a step-by-step approach to define service-level objectives.

DZoneSiri Varma Vegiraju

25 Habits of Highly Effective Managers

Sharp folks from across the First Round community share the small habits that great managers do, including delivering feedback with care, opening up about failure, and sending praise up the chain.

First Round ReviewFirst Round Staff

Leadership Storytelling Is Powerful—But Not In The Way You Think

To form productive relationships with people who hold different perspectives, building trust is more urgent than persuading them to agree with you.

ForbesEsther K. Choy

Culture, People & Teams

Creating Joy at Work: The Key to Employee Engagement - Blog

The quality team at East London Foundation Trust (ELFT) discovered that joy at work is the core ingredient for successful, high-performing teams.

Corporate Rebels

Better Alternatives to Performance Reviews

This article critiques traditional performance reviews and proposes alternatives that enhance employee feedback and engagement. It highlights the negative impacts of outdated review systems and advocates for continuous feedback mechanisms. By addressing key needs like effective feedback and fair salary decisions, the article offers strategies to build a collaborative workplace culture that empowers individuals and improves organizational outcomes.

Tobi’s Tidbits of TyrannyTobias Mende

Supporting your holiday on-caller

Because Christmas dumpster fires are no fun

Nuts and BoltsNatasha Jaffe

How to Notice and Appreciate an Overworked Employee

In this Asking for a Friend episode, Karin Hurt shares practical ways to celebrate and reward an overworked employee.

Let's Grow LeadersKarin Hurt

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Trunk-based development: Increasing engineering velocity and reducing frustration | Bucket

What if your whole team could just work on the same code at the same time to avoid these merge conflicts AND there was a quick way to deactivate features that aren’t behaving without needing to deploy? This is where trunk-based development comes into play.

BucketRon Cohen

How to Build a Robust LLM Application

Last month at Cherrypick we launched a brand new meal generator that uses LLMs to create personalized meal plans. It has been a great success and we are pleased with the results. Customers are changing their plans 30% less and using their plans in their baskets 14% more. However, getting to this point was not straightforward, and we learned many things that can go wrong when building these types of systems. Here is what we learned about building an LLM-based product that actually works, and ends up in production rather than languishing in an investor deck as a cool tech demo.

https://chrismdp.com

Understanding and Managing Friction in Software Development

Effective software delivery depends on strategically managing friction - the forces that impede progress between ideation and implementation. Technology leaders who master this capability systematically eliminate unnecessary barriers while preserving essential protective controls, achieving both spe

Jeff Foster

Diátaxis

Diátaxis is a widely-adopted, pragmatic and systematic approach to thinking about and creating documentation.

LogoDaniele Procida

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

How Trauma Can Inform Leadership, Employee Performance

Trauma informed leadership is an awareness of how events traumatic events shape us and how we can apply posttraumatic growth to improve.

People Managing PeopleMichael Stanford

From Cocoon to Butterfly: A Social Caterpillar’s Guide to Events

People are often surprised to learn that I used to consider myself an introvert. I speak at conferences, interact with many people, and am rarely the quietest person in the room. I don’t fit the usual image of an introvert. For me, introversion and extraversion are all about energy:

Melinda SeckingtonMelinda Seckington

Networking For People Who Don’t Network

These are the heuristics that I use for professional networking.

Stay SaaSyStay SaaSy

How I Make 35,000 Decisions Every Single Day — Without Burnout

I know…

MediumDuane Wright

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