Team Building; Aligning Developers; Funding for DevProd teams; Mistakes of First-time CTOs

🙏 Points of inspiration for you this week before the summer heat kicks in, starting with ⤵️

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🎙️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.

Article of the Week ⭐
“Of course, this mission and vision must be interesting to your people. If it’s not interesting nobody will follow.” — Adrian Stanek

🤝 Aligning Developers: A Personal Approach
Adrian Stanek whom you might know as snackableCTO for his short insights shares his playbook on how to bring a team together to foster a sense of comradeship and shared purpose.

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? Let’s dive in!

Step 1: Vision
Clearly communicate the mission and vision to inspire your team. This doesn’t 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. It’s not to paint a pretty picture where everyone is happy.

“There is no way to make everybody happy. We need to go through something.”

It’s 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.

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Step 2: Overcome Resistance
Adrian highlights a key aspect of resistance. Don’t 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 of…

I just mastered XYZ, so why should I start learning something new?

I don’t 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 step…

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 👇
💰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

man in black framed sunglasses holding fan of white and gray striped cards
Photo by Shane on Unsplash
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 you’ll more easily decide whether it is time for such an initiative in your company—or how to improve an existing one.

30% of companies start with CI/CD pipelines…

… 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

🙈 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.

Sergio Visinoni 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. That’s 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.

“When building a tech roadmap in isolation, you're essentially pushing down all the unsolved prioritiSation issues to the team.”

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.

That’s 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 👋