🔬 Underestimation, Lessons from Elon, Delivery Dates, Uncertainty, Depleted Teams, High Leverage Activities: TMW #309 by CTO Craft
Hello again!
If you've been considering our CTO Circles, now's a brilliant time to get involved: this week sees the launch of our free online taster Circle sessions. Spaces have run out for this week, but we'll be opening some new dates as well, so you can come along and see what the fuss is all about. There are currently 12 Circles running across Europe and North America, with more coming in January and February - if the idea of having a small group of trusted peers to compare notes with, share experiences, challenges and solutions with, get moral support from and grow new skills with, this is the best way to go about it.
We'd love to help - to get started, you can schedule a chat with our Circles team here: https://calendly.com/sid-ctocraft/30min
There are still a few Bytes events in the diary before the end of the year, including our Dec 10th Festive Social in London - if you're in town and free that evening, we'd love to see you. Tickets are free - come for nice food and drink, networking and a panel. And probably some other stuff. More details below!
Until next time!
Andy @ CTO Craft
PS: Take part in the CTO Craft leadership and disruption survey here!
CTO Craft Bytes
CTO Craft Bytes: Your hiring process is your best employer branding tool, Fri 2 Dec 2022 at 12:30 GMT
As an engineering leader, you know the challenge: competition for software talent is fierce. Learn how the best hiring processes deliver a quick turnaround from first contact to hiring decision, constructive candidate feedback no matter the outcome, and a lower workload for hiring managers. In every single hiring loop.
Speaker: Claus Höfele, Head of Engineering at doctari group
CTO Craft Bytes - Festive Social! Fri 9 Dec 2022 at 18:00
What a year it’s been! The CTO Craft team would love to invite you to an evening of merriment and cheer as we all take a moment to celebrate 2022 with the CTO Craft community.
Venue: Hoxton Underbelly, 11 Hoxton Square, London
Reads of the Week
Underestimation
I subscribe to Mike Cohn’s newsletter and I received a post entitled "7 Reasons Teams Underestimate Work." It was quite short but sweet and valuable, and it inspired me to think of other reasons, not directly related to the team, that might cause the team to underestimate.
Management Lessons From Elon’s Twitter
It’s been a wild week in Twitter land, as Elon has grabbed the controls of the plane not with the detached cool of Han Solo, but something more like the wild-eyed, manic smile of Cyrus the Virus in Con Air. We’re here to offer some thoughts on why some of what Elon is doing might make sense – and also why some of his moves really are as crazy as they look.
From our Sponsors
Using DORA Metrics to Measure Software Delivery Performance - from Pentalog
The faster your teams can make changes to your software, the sooner you can deliver value to your customers, run experiments, and receive valuable feedback. With seven years of data collection and research, DORA has developed and validated four metrics that measure software delivery performance.
About our Sponsors
Thanks as always to the amazing sponsors helping CTO Craft bring you resources like this newsletter, our events, community and more:
AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Google Cloud, iTechArt, Jellyfish, LinearB, Lohika, 101 Ways, O’Reilly, PGS Software, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, Swarmia, YLD
Culture & People
Removing uncertainty: the tip of the iceberg
We spend a lot of time working on things that nobody else knows exists. I’m sure there’s some kind of inverse correlation between the delight of a user experience and the challenge of the implementation in software at scale.
How do you interview a VP of Engineering?
One of my interviewing habits is to write down questions I was asked alongside my responses to them. I do this as a way to self debrief and reflect on how well I think I did. Over the years, I have collected quite a few questions from interviewing for VP of Engineering positions.
The Perks of a High-Documentation, Low-Meeting Work Culture
Our low-meeting, high-documentation work culture enables us to get way more done in less time. We'll tell you exactly why it works so well.
6 Ways to Reenergize a Depleted Team
A client of Ron’s, “Kelsey,” a division general manager of a large food manufacturer, recently told him, “Everyone on my team seems tired…all the time. I ask them how they’re doing, and they tell me ‘fine.’ If someone asks for time off, I say yes.
Tension: why product development requires balancing conflicting goals – Help your organization focus on successful outcomes
This article describes the simple language I use to describe product development: opportunity, output, outcome, and impact. But more importantly it describes the tensions and unexpected implications in the model:
Leadership & Self-management
Focus on high-leverage activities.
"High Output Management" is a book by Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, that helps people to understand how they can manage their teams more efficiently towards high-leverage tasks.
Pyramid of Leadership Self/Other Awareness
How can you work more effectively with diverse individuals and teams as a product leader? We all tend to have our "go-to" explanations when things go wrong at work. You can usually boil things down to leadership issues. That and grit and perseverance.
36 Questions to Ask Your Future Software Employer
Congrats on nailing that interview! You’ve prepared hard and aced all the questions. You can relax now. “Do you have any questions for us?” says the interviewer . Oh! It’s not over, you realize. You’re expected to have some questions.
What are Healthy Relationships?
Strong relationships built in the small moments will be what you lean on to get through tough times
Agile, Engineering & Product
Delivery Dates
A lot of organisations choose to optimise for predictability. Not only is that what they often say they want, but projects as a construct actively encourages that, and often there are incentives that push you strongly into that space. We’ve probably all heard “On time, on budget” as the desired outcome. There’s only one problem with that…
GitHub Copilot Isn't Worth the Risk
On November 3rd programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick, along with the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, filed a class action lawsuit against GitHub, Microsoft (its parent company), and OpenAI.
Cache invalidation really is one of the hardest problems in computer science
My colleagues recently wrote a great post on the Netflix tech blog about a tough performance issue they wrestled with. They ultimately diagnosed the problem as false sharing, which is a performance problem that involves caching. I'm going to take that post and write a simplified version of part of it here, as an exercise…
Don’t Equate Story Points to Hours
If someone in your company wants to peg story points to hours, just stop calling them points and use hours or days instead.
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