🍇 Barrels and Bottlenecks, Engineering Culture, Doom Loops, Self-Reviews, Risk, Reliability Carrots, Burnout: TMW #415

Hello, hello, hello! Welcome to the week

A huge thank you to the almost 300 of you who have taken part so far in our annual Compensation Survey - there's still time to get involved, and it's completely anonymous, so please do take a couple of minutes to jump in. Remember, the more data we can collect, the more useful the report will be - we need you!

CTO Craft: 2025 Compensation Survey

CTO Craft alongside Albany Partners are conducting a survey on Compensation norms across tech leadership.

Tickets for CTO Craft Con: London are flying out as the last remaining Early Bird slots fill up - don’t miss your chance to grab one before 31st January. Exciting updates are on the way - coaching sessions, workshops, a pre-event mixer, lively after-party, serene boat cruise, and an intimate private dinner, all to be revealed soon! Unlock your tickets now with the code: Community-Spring-25

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

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Events

Don't forget, as a TMW subscriber you have access to the Member Pricing for upcoming CTO Craft Con events.  You can unlock membership pricing by using the following access codes in the checkout when purchasing tickets:

CTO Craft Con: London 2025 - Community-Spring-25
CTO Craft Con: Toronto 2025 - Community-Toronto-25

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

Reads of the Week

Engineering Culture and Team Dynamics in a Challenging Climate

The Industry Perspective Q1 2025

Human-Centric EngineeringJohn Durrant

The deadline doom loop

... and how to escape it!

Product for EngineersJames Hawkins

From our Sponsors

[Partner Spotlight] Celebrating Our Collaboration with Softwire

We’re proud to shine a spotlight on our long-term partner, Softwire, a company that continues to inspire through its commitment to innovation, collaboration, and community support. Over the years, Softwire has not only sponsored our conferences but also collaborated on key initiatives like the "Spilling the AI Tea" survey and report, hosted community meetups in their offices, and consistently demonstrated leadership in the tech industry.

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

The Complete Guide to Writing Self-Reviews (That Actually Get Read)

Struggling with your self-review? This guide demystifies this part of the performance review process, showing you exactly what to write and who reads it, so you can stop agonizing over lengthy paragraphs or incomplete bullet points.

logo-footer

Mistakes to avoid when writing self-assessments

Why they’re bad and what to do instead to help your manager

The Caring Techie NewsletterIrina Stanescu

Bridging theory and practice in engineering strategy.

Some people I’ve worked with have lost hope that engineering strategy actually exists within any engineering organizations. I imagine that they, reading through the steps to build engineering strategy, or the strategy for navigating private equity ownership, are not impressed. Instead, these ideas probably come across as theoretical at best. In less polite company, they might describe these ideas as fake constructs. Let’s talk about it! Because they’re right. In fact, they’re right in two different ways. First, this book is focused on explaining how to create clean, refine and definitive strategy documents, where initially most real strategy artifacts look rather messy. Second, applying these techniques in practice can require a fair amount of creativity. It might sound easy, but it’s quite difficult in practice.

Irrational Exuberance

Sidebar #3: Two Flavors of Medium Risk - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

When you look at a likelihood/impact risk matrix, you might notice that “medium” appears twice – once as high-likelihood/low-impact, and once as low-likelihood/high-impact. These two “mediums” aren’t at all the same!

Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Culture, People & Teams

Building Barrels, Not Bottlenecks - Organizational Physics by Lex Sisney

There’s a video circulating about barrels and ammunition as a metaphor for organizational scaling. It features famed VC Keith Rabois discussing the difference between “barrel people” and “ammunition people.” In essence, as a company scales and hires more people, it often excels at bringing in “ammunition” experts—those who operate with high velocity to execute tasks within a defined framework, or “barrel.” A barrel represents a business or product line. You could have an abundance of ammunition, but your organization’s capacity for growth is limited by the number and quality of barrels it has. According to Rabois, scaling effectively requires hiring leaders who can design and build new and better barrels, not just ammunition to fill existing ones. This metaphor resonates with any leader who has tried adding more developers to a software project, only to see progress slow down, or who has pushed for more sales, only to find the client onboarding process bottlenecked. The problem isn’t resources; it’s the efficiency and capacity of the organizational barrels. While the metaphor is insightful, be cautious of adopting seductive sounding advice from VCs and other influencers. Scaling isn’t just about hiring the right barrel builders. Blindly following this approach can lead to wasted time, energy, and opportunity—and might even jeopardize your core business. So, what should you do? Here are five practical tips to scale effectively while avoiding common pitfalls: 1. Lifecycle Stage Matters If your business is in the pre-product-market fit stage, don’t try to build more barrels. First, focus on achieving product-market fit for your core business. As Marc Andreessen famously said, startups have two phases: pre-product-market fit and post-product-market fit. Building new barrels is a post-product-market fit opportunity. Attempting to scale prematurely by adding barrels will likely cause your business to faceplant. 2. The Core Foundation Is Critical If […]

Organizational Physics by Lex SisneyLex Sisney

A Toolbox for High-Performance Teams | Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Braden Kelley is a popular innovation keynote speaker creating workshops, masterclasses, webinars, tools, and training for organizations on innovation, design thinking and change management.

Human-Centered Change and InnovationStefan Lindegaard

RDEL #75: How do interruptions impact different software engineering activities?

Certain tasks, and their complexity, change how impactful an interruption is. Research also discovers a disconnect between perception and physiological data.

Research-Driven Engineering LeadershipLizzie Matusov

Depthfinding for Managing Performance

When managing underperformance feels like navigating a maze, having a map can be a lifeline. Enter Depthfinding.

The ReadyRodney Evans

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Jade Rubick - Reliability is all stick, no carrot

The reliability space is all stick, no carrot. Here are some ways to produce good results anyway

LazywillLearn more

225. Systems Ideas that Sound Good But Almost Never Work—“Let’s just…”

Some engineering patterns that sound good but almost never work as intended

Hardcore Software by Steven SinofskySteven Sinofsky

Developer Productivity in 2025: More AI, but Mixed Results

In 2024, a mismatch emerged between leadership expectations about AI-assisted developer productivity and what devs actually need. What will this year bring?

The New StackJennifer Riggins

Infrastructure Platform Teams

An infrastructure management team is not as effective as an infrastructure platform.

Infrastructure as CodeKief Morris

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

When Struggling at Work Isn’t Your Fault: Finding the Right Environment

How to recognize when it’s the workplace, not you, and take steps to thrive in the right setting.

Management MattersRohitha Yarlagadda

From Top Developer to poor Leader: The Myths That Broke Me

Your best developers deserve better than being thrown into the deep end.

Level Up CodingDaniel Llach

Study: Intuitive introverts lead the most successful teams | Spotlight

An unwritten law of leadership states the loudest voices in the room are not always the wisest. Some of history’s most notable and suc…

Spotlight

I’m 28. Here’s What I Would Tell My 18-Year-Old Self

When I was 18, I felt lost.

MediumDan Koe

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