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October 24 · Issue #115 · View online
Level Up delivers a curated newsletter for leaders in tech. A project by https://patkua.com. Ideal for busy people such as Tech Leads, Engineering Managers, VPs of Engineering, CTOs and more.
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10 calendar weeks to go If you’re like most technical leaders I’m working with, you finished your 2022 planning and you realise there’s not a lot of time until the end of the year. Although there are 10 calendar weeks left until the end of 2021, there’s often the big holiday season. For the Americas, it’s events like Thanksgiving and for other parts of the world, Christmas and or the period running up to the new year. Time constraints are a great tool to help us refocus. With unlimited time, we feel we can accomplish anything, but a great time management technique is to pick shorter time-boxes. Answer the question, “What is the (one) most important thing to complete before the end of the year?” Once you have answered that, make sure you communicate this and connect it to everyone’s actions. A key part of good leadership is reminding people of their team mission and their current goal that contributes toward it. In knowledge-based work and the confusion of trying to please everyone, you might notice people working on less important work. Your challenge for this week is to answer the question above and to make sure you communicate this (ideally several times before the end of the year) to refocus your team. Enjoy this week’s newsletter and be sure to pass it on to a friend or colleague.
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What is the (one) most important thing your team needs to complete before the end of the year?
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Scaling OutSystems over 20 years Paulo Rosado started low-code platform OutSystems in 2001 - he’s led it as CEO ever since, all the way to a $9.5 billion valuation. Now they’re confronting technical debt.
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My CTO job description
Reading time: 4mins It’s a great practice to try to write down your job description, especially for high-level executive roles that change as the organisation changes. This is a great example of David Stănete (@stanete) sharing his current focus for his role and a fun use of early 90’s X-men pictures 😅.
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How to find engineering leadership roles
Reading time: 3mins Another great post from Will Larson (@lethain) with advice on how to find engineering leadership roles. I’ve definitely experienced and heard of some of the constraints he describes when searching and also heard of many people finding new roles with some of the suggestions.
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The Professional Hierarchy of Needs
Reading time: 3mins
Bradford Cross (@bradfordcross) shares a great mental model for leaders to keep in mind. It’s not only useful for evaluating if your own professional needs are met, but also that you are providing the professional needs for all of your team and future team members.
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Only two more workshops for 2021 planned (Nov 17, 18)
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Tokyo 2020 Olympics suffered half a billion attempted cyberattacks
Reading time: 3mins This is a fascinating reveal of some behind-the-scenes management of a worldwide event as reported by Sead Fadilpašić (@journalancer). What a challenging role it must be to prepare for such a huge event.
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The most used software components in the world
Daniel Stenberg (@bagder), leads us through a fun, theoretical exercise attempting to identify the most widely used software components in the world. Take his suggestions with a grain of salt as he is the founder and lead developer of one of the tools 😉
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Changing the Wheels on a Moving Bus — Spotify’s Event Delivery Migration
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Level up your communication skills with this self-paced course
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Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging at GitHub in 2021
Reading time: 10mins It’s rare to see such large public companies share their information on Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, so congrats 👏👏👏 to GitHub on publishing theirs. You can also read the introductory blog post written by Sofia Bonnet (@sofiabonnet) here.
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Avoiding employee disengagement in hybrid teams
Reading time: 7mins Hybrid teams are more at risk of employee disengagement. Paige Magarrey (@paigemagarrey) offers 5 tips from frontline workers on how to keep employees engaged.
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How Agile scaffolds enable emergence
Reading time: 5mins
Pete Gillard-Moss (@petegillardmoss) looks at the ideas of scaffolds and how scaffolds connect to agile ways of working. I really enjoyed the idea of mapping different practices and processes to different categories of scaffolding. It’s a great thought experiment to explore if you have the right (or wrong) scaffolding in place in your teams and organisations.
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Don't confuse/equate reporting lines with communication lines.
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A very good mantra to adopt and encourage
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The continuous improvement mantra:
"Always work to ensure that next month will be better than last month."
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If you enjoyed this newsletter, please send me feedback and share it with others!
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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