How to get 'Executive Presence', Hampton 2024 AI & Business Report

Newsletter - Issue #03

In this issue of groCTO 🚀 we’ve handpicked:

• Our week’s favorite - Getting Support for Technical Improvement

• Other insightful pieces:

  • Executive Presence: How to get "it" by @ethan

  • 2024 AI & Business report by Hampton

• And lastly, ‘groCTO: Originals’ podcast with

  Luca Rossi
  founder at
  Refactoring
  on raising efficient dev teams.

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🤝 Great CTO: Getting Stakeholder Support for Technical Improvement

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Daniel Walters

helps CTOs focus on outcomes. He has prepared a useful guide for you that will help you navigate discussions about technical debt, neglect and future investments.

Most importantly, steps you can take for maintaining a healthy relationship with your stakeholders and board members.

Their podcast episode on the matter offers a deep dive into this topic from the perspective of an engineering leader translating to business stakeholders on the finer details coming from tech investments, maintenance and engineering capabilities.

• Understand the need for technical improvement

• Reframe the need in terms accessible to your audience

  • - what are the connections back to customer experience or risks?

• Prevent technical debt from occurring

• Track technical improvement and adapt based on progress

• Be intentional about how you communicate and engage.

As a CTO it is your opportunity to understand that these challenges are a product journey, not a project. To continuously and blamelessly reframe situations that should have been done but weren’t. Clarify how structural neglect and investment into technical excellence is separate and complementary to operational maintenance.

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🕴Executive Presence: How to get "it"

Ethan Evans

from

Level Up by Ethan Evans

shares his decades of experience as Amazon VP on how to recognize, foster and master executive presence for leadership roles, especially CTOs.

Ethan mentions…

Executive Presence is at least:

1. Being seen as an authoritative figure. This doesn't mean "the person in charge", but rather someone important to listen to. Someone with knowledge or information.

2. Being seen as decisive. Able to take action and clear barriers.

3. Being seen as influential. Able to create alignment and inspire others.

It’s a dance of perception, self-control and self-awareness for which no single formula exists. However, it can be mastered with many valid approaches depending on your circumstances and personality.

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📔 2024 AI & Business Report by Hampton

Hampton published its annual report on how AI founders are balancing their spending. The report which you can find on Hampton’s website after a free registration-gate details

Here’s a quick summary of what we learned after analyzing 100+ businesses and how they’re using AI:

• 35% have dedicated R&D budgets for AI

• Of those with dedicated budgets, 65% budgeted more than $100k

• Finance, biotech, and SaaS had the highest R&D budgets

• 37% of founders reported AI as having an impact on their staff size

• Founders are purposefully not using AI with customer and personal data, HR, and creative work

• 89.6% of founders are using AI or are working to implement it within their business

The report highlights that most founders use the OpenAI family of tools most frequently in the business. Before closing the report, they also detail the AI founders’ favorite places, publications, and podcasts to follow to stay up to date on relevant AI business news.

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Why so serious?

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groCTO: Originals | Implementing data-driven approach for building efficient dev teams Luca Rossi

In the recent episode of ‘groCTO: Originals’ (Formerly: Beyond the Code), Host Kshitij Mohan, engages in an insightful discussion with Luca Rossi, the driving force behind a vast engineering community comprising over 70,000 members. The core of their discussion revolves around implementing a data-driven approach to building efficient dev teams. 

Luca delves deeply into the intricacies of the data-driven approach, emphasizing key metrics for scaling efficient dev teams. He also offers valuable insights on establishing the right processes for code reviews. Lastly, he elaborates on a thought-provoking concept – ‘Shift focus from 10X engineers to 10X teams’.

And that’s it for today! See you next week, Ciao 👋

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Credits 🙏

Curators- Diligently curated by our community members Denis & Priyasha

Sponsors- This newsletter is sponsored by Typo AI - Ship reliable software faster.

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