Funding for DevProd teams, Mistakes of First-time CTOs
Newsletter - Issue #11
đ Points of inspiration for you this week before the summer heat kicks in, starting with ⤾ď¸
đď¸groCTO: Originals | Team Building 101: Communication & Innovation ft. Paul Lewis
In a recent episode, host Kovid Batra is joined by Paul Lewis, a seasoned technology leader with over 30 years of experience, shares his insights on building tech teams from scratch, offering valuable perspectives from his vast experience in the technology sector.
Paul addresses crucial elements by aligning developers to the basic principles of the organisation, implementing effective hiring and talent acquisition strategies, establishing robust processes and communication practices. At Pythian, he tackled challenges head-on, prioritised aligning tech innovation with business requirements, and offered parting advice for aspiring tech leaders on the importance of these elements in driving success.
Enjoying our content? Share it with your fellow tech leadersâ¤ď¸
Article of the Week â
âOf course, this mission and vision must be interesting to your people. If itâs not interesting nobody will follow.â â Adrian Stanek
đ¤ Aligning Developers: A Personal Approach
Imagine you have a clear action and go present it to your team. 10 people fill the room and you enthusiastically go through your presentation and boom, resistance. Apparently for no reason. Why is this? Letâs dive in!
Step 1: Vision
Clearly communicate the mission and vision to inspire your team. This doesnât mean you tell your team what to do. Merely stating what the desired outcomes are and reasons for picking them.
The Mission and Vision are about effective storytelling to inspire your people. Itâs not to paint a pretty picture where everyone is happy.
âThere is no way to make everybody happy. We need to go through something.â
Itâs to give your engineering team something to believe in. Make your developers the story's heroes; they will follow the journey through.
Finding it difficult to align your business & dev efforts or unsure about clear goals, great communication, or strategic alignment? At groCTO connect, our mentors are here to help you navigate your leadership career with confidence.
Advance your leadership skills with 1:1 mentorship from top CTOs, VPEs & tech leaders.
Step 2: Overcome Resistance
Adrian highlights a key aspect of resistance. Donât suppress it, use it as a form of feedback, albeit clumsy.
Resistance tells us:
I like XYZ language better
ABC is more effective than XYZ because ofâŚ
I just mastered XYZ, so why should I start learning something new?
I donât want to start at the beginning again; I would instead join another team to stay with what I have learned.
Disagreements will naturally arise even in high-performing teams. Focus on showing to your team what they have to gain by overcoming the resistance rather than shirking it.
Resistance is not permanent, it is friction to the initial momentum. Once the team is moving steadily in the same direction resistance diminishes.
This is key for the next stepâŚ
Step 3: Ownership & Responsibility
Everyone has a bit of a micromanager inside of us. Define the desired qualities and frameworks you expect from your teams and let them figure out the details. Remove obstacles but do not force your own preferred path onto the team. This will encourage them to regress back to resistance and vision-building.
The specifics of achieving that mission should be left to the team. A cohesive, motivated team is grown by tackling challenges together where they are free to explore their proposed solutions within given constraints.
Other highlights đ
đ°How DevProd teams got funded: 20 real-world examples
Abi Noda gives us a glimpse into their research report on Developer Productivity initiatives in software organisations. You may know these initiatives under a different name:
Developer Experience
Platform Engineering
DevOps
One of the most frequent questions Gartner gets asked is how to go from zero to one. Engineers and leaders from 20 large tech companies were interviewed, including DoorDash, Lattice, and Yelp.
Hopefully after reading through the main findings youâll more easily decide whether it is time for such an initiative in your companyâor how to improve an existing one.
30% of companies start with CI/CD pipelinesâŚ
⌠followed by CI/CD pipeline bottlenecks as the company grows
Delivery bottlenecks are highly visible and become the focus for investment
Investments used for pipeline optimisations and engineering intelligence
Other successful alternative reasons to starting DevProd initiatives include:
Focusing on onboarding new developers
Improving containerisation infrastructure
Decomposing monoliths
By the way, did you miss our summary of Gartnerâs Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) report published in Issue #09?
𤥠Haha!
It is better to keep my mouth shut and pay off my mortgage :P
P.S. Iâd write YAML all day for that much. Is it just me?
đ The 10 Most Common Mistakes of First-Time CTOs, #5 and #6
The Chief Technology Officer position is a rare breed. It is a mix of entrepreneurial gusto and technical ability. Always trained in the field and through experience, usually with unrelated fields of academic study. Most CTOs have grown into the role by necessity or picked it as founders.
has a practical series for patterns he observed by first-time CTO to help them avoid obvious, yet unintuitive mistakes. This brief is about the ones he numbered number #5 and #6.
#5 100% in Reactive mode
Reduce the chaos surrounding your calendar by building a healthy planning discipline. According to Sergio, the non-negotiable are:
Address the systemic issues causing all the fires
Dedicate a non-trivial amount of time and attention to proactive work
Set a time budget for recurring weekly meetings
#6 Tech Roadmap Separate from the Product Roadmap
All the important problems are on the product roadmap. Thatâs also where the most difficult conversations lay in wait, in contrast to the relative comfort of technology issues, maintenance and keeping the lights on activities.
âWhen building a tech roadmap in isolation, you're essentially pushing down all the unsolved prioritiSation issues to the team.â
Sergio advices CTOs stuck on this treadmill to approach the product priorities first. Validate them with the appropriate stakeholders and leverage commitments as a vessel to build trust. This trust is then available when technology concerns get translated to business outcomes and make their way onto the list.
Thatâs for Today!
Whether you're hustling with your side projects, catching up with the latest technologies, or simply relaxing & recharging, wish you all a lovely day ahead.
See you next week, Ciao đ
Credits đ
Curators- Diligently curated by our community members Denis & Kovid
Sponsors- This newsletter is sponsored by Typo AI - Ship reliable software faster.
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I was suprised. Thanks for the curation, much appreciated! It's one of my favourite topics, and in my personal opinion matters a lot.
Thanks!