- [The CTO has] one job
"To give control, you have to create clarity and develop competence." -Paulo André - How to break the cycle of firefighting
Jesal Gadhia, reminds us that we need to think at multiple levels in order to make systematic change - 3 main soft skills a Tech Lead needs to develop
Anemari Fiser offers great advice on the core skills that you will need - “Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmaking
Charity Majors wades through the bullshit that has been shared by Brian Chesky et. al. and provides a useful antidote to it all - The one way I know a team is in trouble
Suzan Bond highlights the dangers of false harmony in a team and gives advice on how to address this. - How hard should your employer work to retain you?
Charity Majors's advice is spot on for both employers and employees - The crucial difference between nice and kind leadership
Sergio Visioni explores the pitfalls of being 'nice' as a leader - The 10 most common mistakes of first-time CTOs
Sergio Visinoni's 5 part series really resonates with my own experience of becoming a CTO and the mistakes that I made - Task Relevant Maturity
Luca Rossi shares an excellent summary of the concept of Task Relevant Maturity from Andy Grove's book "High Output Management" - Briefly: Anonymous questions
Kellan Elliott-McCrea reflects on making use of anonymous questions for Q+A of leadership teams. - Unexpected anti-patterns for engineering leaders
Will Larson outlines some ant-patterns to watch out for as an engineering leader - The purpose of a system is what It does
"When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that the machine is never broken." -Anil Dash - Language of business
Mike Fisher's reminder that everyone speaks finance at a leadership level and so you will benefit from learning this language too - Making work (and life) less stressful by making better decisions.
Nicky Thompson delves into the psychology of decision making and how we can use our understanding to make better decisions in this excellent talk. - (Re)Building trust & confidence as a CTO
Jamie Smith Webb's powerful story includes many valuable lessons for building trust and confidence - What they don’t tell you about engineering leadership
Robbie Clutton's sage advice for engineering leaders, including "Stay curious longer" - Developing leadership styles
Will Larson describes different forms of leadership, and when they might best apply - How to communicate when trust is low (without digging yourself into a deeper hole)
Charity Majors offers really essential practical advice for building trust - Positive gossip
Luca Sartoni outlines how to build trust through "positive gossip" - The art of subtle influence
Casey Rosenberg offers advice on how to lead without control - Stop making people make up their mind
One of the biggest unforced errors that companies make is pushing people into making decisions when they don’t need to. - There is no number one tip
James Stanier reminds us that there is no secret or silver bullet to becoming a good leader and so we have learn how to learn to be a better leader. - Task-Relevant Maturity
Candost Dagdeviren shares their summary of Andy Grove's concept of Task-Relevant Maturity and how this affects delegation - Notes on The Culture Map
Pat Kua's notes on Erin Meyer's book about cultural differences - Don’t create chaos
Great practical advice for avoiding creating chaos in your teams - You don't "get" anyone to do anything
Matt LeMay's advice about how to cultivate your power by seeking to help, seeking to understand, and seeking to align around common goals is excellent. - How engineering leaders can better organize their day
"You can’t afford to overlook the importance of having a plan for how you should spend your work time. If you don’t, you’ll get caught fighting fires and dealing with unplanned issues." — Harry Guinness - Letting go
Roy Rapaport shares a key lesson about letting go, "You can’t make people do good work. You can’t stop them from doing bad work. All you can do is share context and enforce consequences." - Skills that make a big difference — Empathy
Adrian Hornsby paints a picture of why empathy is essential for becoming a better engineer and gives advice on how to increase your empathy - No deadlines for you! Software development without estimates, specs, or other lies
Dan Milstein offers a really clear model of how to have conversations which put uncertainty and risk at the center of a conversation between the developers and the rest of the business (instead of everyone pretending such nasty things don’t exist). - Questions to ask yourself to become a better leader
Lena Reinhard provides an excellent framework to help you reflect on how you wish to develop as a leader. - "We’re All Leaders” Is A Better Way To Work
Ari Weinzwe shares the power of working in an environment where everyone is a leader - Getting along with difficult coworkers
Amy Gallo offers excellent advice on the Women At Work podcast - How to plan?
Invaluable advice on planning from Kellan Elliott-McCrea - Three ways to make time for reflection as an engineering leader
Pat Kua on the importance of taking time to reflect - Why are you so busy?
"Contrary to popular belief: back-to-back meetings isn't a badge of honour, it's a red flag." — Tom Lingham - An in-depth guide to everything you should do in your first three months as a first-time manager of managers
Lena Reinhard shares a detailed guide to planning your first 3 months in this role, and offers plenty of advice and a reminder of many of the things you need to be thinking about. - Why loneliness in technology is a serious matter and how to support tech leaders
Amber O'Brien shares the reasons that technology leaders might feel lonely and how you can support yourself and others. - Be a better partner to product management
Frankie Nicoletti reminds us that we need to partner with product management to succeed and ahares some great advice on how to do this in this 10 min talk. - Use these tips to improve your executive presence
Practical communications advice from Jade Rubrick - The thermocline of truth
Rob Miller on the risks of creating an environment where bad news is slow to bubble up through your organisation - Software engineering practices to improve management
Nicky Thompson gives a great reminder that you can leverage many of the skills you learned as an engineer to make you a better manager - How to Be a Career-Changing Mentor — 25 Tips From The Best Mentors We Know
All sorts of good ideas to consider how to approach different aspects of mentoring - Priorities: Rocks, pebbles, and sand
A useful metaphor for thinking about your time at work as well as in life. - The Manager's Path
Camille's Fournier's comprehensive, practical guide to managing technology teams - Tear it down
"Leadership comes from everywhere" — Rands - The Rands Test
The Rands Test is a simple test to help you think about the health of communication in your company, - The Joel test: 12 steps to better code
Joel Spolsky's highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team. - How to drive change beyond your role
Some excellent advice from Péter Szász for anyone wanting to make change in their organsation - Parkinson's Law: It's real, so use it
James Stanier on how setting deadlines helps with software development projects - Not technical enough
Many engineering leaders worry about not being "technical enough". Brienna Ransom shares her own journey with this question and how it is an area rife with bias and is really context dependent - Learning from a strategy project
Anna Shipman shares some excellent advice for leading on strategy - The superpower of feeling your emotions
Evgeny Shadchnev shares the power of responding consciously to our emotions - Accountability Dial — what it is, how to use it, and how it will help your team
Jonathan Raymond's Accountability dial is a really helpful way for you to consider how you escalate when people you manage do not respond to your feedback. This can help you avoid getting stuck and also avoid holding back on feedback before finally exploding. - How to delegate effectively: 10 tips for managers
Julia Martin's tips for delegating - If you want to be a terrible manager, focus on being a shit shield
Jade Rubick with a healthy reminder if you see your job as a manager is to "protect the team" you are likely to create a poor environment to work in - Staff Engineer's Path resource list
Tanya Reilly's list of all the articles, books, talks etc. that are referenced in her book "The Staff Engineer's Path" - Leading below the surface
LaTonya Wilkins's book provides a useful framework for reflecting on whether, as a leader, you are building psychologically safe relationships with people and also concrete ways in which you can improve. - Turn the ship around!
Anna Shipman gives an insightful summary of the book "Turn the ship around", an inspiring book about creating a "leader-leader" approach to running a nuclear submarine - 5 challenges startup leadership teams face & how to avoid them
Richard Hughes-Jones offers advice about how to navigate these challenges based on his experience helping leadership teams through this critical stage of growth. Scaleup leadership team - Book summary: The Advantage
Sean Craig summarises Patrick Lencioni's excellent book on the importance of organisational health and how to to develop it - How women rise: Break the 12 habits holding you back - A summary
Richard Hughes-Jones provides a helpful summary of Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith's book, "How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back". The advice it offers is valuable to everyone developing their careers. - Being glue
So much of most valuable and essential work of software development is not coding and this work is often undervalued when it comes to gaining promotion. Tanya Reilly provides excellent advice to both engineers and managers on how to deal with this challenge. - Don’t ask forgiveness, radiate intent
Elizabeth Ayer's advice is spot on if you want to build trust and gain support. - How to hold your team accountable
Dave Bailey offer's a summary of Jonathan Raymond's Accountability Dial framework to help you think about how you hold your team accountable. - High output management
Anna Shipman gives a concise summary of the most useful book I have read on management, Andy Grove's "High output management" - High output management
Anna Shipman's summary of High Output Management, an excellent book written by Andy Grove - Good Strategy, Bad Strategy - a summary
A summary of Richard Rumelt's excellent book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy - Failure is yours, success belongs to the team
Tess Cooper's talk is brilliant and advises you to accept that you are part of any failure that happens and be specific about the issues that you face. This helps you to work through them as a team and sets an example for others to follow. - Who I want to work for
Keavy McMinn's reflections on the sort of leader they want to work for is a useful reminder that this is a good way to start thinking about sort of leader you want to be - 12 signs you’re working in a feature factory
John Cutler shares signs to watch out for - Focus
Henrik Kniberg says, "stop saying (or thinking) 'I don’t have time'. You have LOTS of time, so it’s just a matter of deciding what you want to do with it" - This is what impactful engineering leadership looks like
Jessica McKellar shares her experiences and gives an excellent outline of what we can aspire to be as leaders - The power of small wins
Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer's research shows that progress in meaningful work boosts your inner work life. As a manager you can create catalysts for progress and remove blockers to progress - RSA Animate - Drive
Animation of Dan Pink's RSA talk about what motivates us: autonomy, mastery and purpose. - Fair process: Managing in the knowledge economy
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne describe the importance of "fair process" in maintaining trust as a manager. - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Patrick Lencioni's fable of a leadership team provides a valuable model for thinking about how a team functions. - Who’s got the monkey?
This classic article is a reminder of how important it is to be explicitly manage who has the initiative and not take it on without thinking - "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" by Richard P. Rumelt
This book is essential reading for anyone working on strategy. I wish I had read it earlier in my career. - CTO Levels™
A framework developed by Etienne de Bruin, Kathy Keating and Scott Graves to help you think about the practices that your tech organisation may need to adopt as you grow - Rands Leadership Slack
This is excellent community of over 30,000 engineering leaders with over 600 channels covering every aspect of engineering leadership - The most surprising principle of good leadership? Don’t be busy
Claire Lew's helpful reminder that one of the easiest mistakes to make as a leader is to be too busy
Productivity
Improving and measuring productivity
- How can I increase velocity when I’m already at full speed?
Some really great advice from Mathias Meyer on how to respond when when your CEO asks you and your team to "go faster" - Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey
Gergely Orosz and Kent Beck clearly lay out the challenges with measuring developer productivity and the dangers of following McKinsey's advice - Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey, Part 2
Part 2 of Gergely Orosz and Kent Beck's insightful articles on measuring developer productivity - Meetings *are* the work
Elizabeth Ayer challenges the trope that meetings aren’t work - Where we’re going wrong with developer productivity
Cat Hicks dispels some key productivity myths, and gives guidance on what to do instead - Measuring engineering efficiency at LinkedIn
[BEHIND A PAYWALL]
Max Kanat-Alexander gives some great insights into the pitfalls of measuring and improving developer productivity - Reduce friction
Minimising friction is key when it comes to helping your team succeed, and Ceej Silverio's guidance really hits the nail on the head - Cannot measure productivity
Martin Fowler's reminder of the issues with measuring productivity in software development