CTO

The State of Women in Tech

This article discusses the lack of women in the tech industry and the barriers that keep them out. It suggests that companies need to create more female-friendly environments, provide improved working incentives, and encourage young girls to pursue computer science. Additionally, it highlights the fact that women-led tech startups receive 16 times less funding than those led by men. The article concludes by emphasizing the need to break down the institutional barriers that keep women out of the tech industry.

Stumbling into chaos

The new director of engineering at a startup had to jump in on day one when the team had just done a re-org and re-oriented the product roadmap. He met with the CTO and engineering leads to understand why the new structure had been put in place, then worked with the product managers to focus on pieces they had high certainty of needing. He also added weekly planning meetings for each product team and daily standups to create structure and accountability. Through retros and feedback, he tailored these initial short-term fixes to their needs. He learned that plans often go awry and we have to adapt, look for short-term engineering work when long-term plans change, and creating a predictable process cadence can help create stability.

The Ambiguous Role of a CTO

The role of a CTO is often difficult to understand, as it can involve managing people, technology, or customers. It is important to understand the distinct approach to the role that is context-dependent and varies from company to company. It is possible to be good at all three, but it is impossible to be great. It is important to find an alignment between what you like and what you are good at, and to hire people to fill in the other positions or allocate those responsibilities to other managers. Introspection and understanding what kind of CTO you are/should be is key, and multitasking is never a good idea.

Scaling Agile in Large Dependent Teams Setups

Agile teams need short backlogs of small items to be implemented in an iteration boundary. Scaled agile has become more popular, but it can be difficult to manage when teams are interdependent and over 100 people are involved. To manage this, data needs to be visible and JIRA dashboards can be used to track progress. Additionally, project management principles, such as creating a Gannt plan and identifying critical paths, can be used to solve dependencies. Finally, research and best practices should be used to ensure success.

How I Moved Away From A Flat Organizational Structure

When the CTO of Narrative Science took over, the company was flat-structured with 14 engineers and 40 employees in total. To prepare for growth, the CTO implemented a QA and DevOps team, created a career ladder with five levels, and set up a program to hire recent graduates. He also had to explain the reasoning behind the changes to the existing organization and train people in having difficult conversations. He learned that it is important to make sure the requirements for each level are clear and that he should deliver on any promises made to employees.

The Approach of Not Stopping for a Massive Rewrite

This article outlines the steps taken by a company to keep innovating and upgrading their product over the past 14 years. They started off with a basic appointment screen built in Delphi and on-premise, and then moved to the cloud with Memento 7. They also had two big overhauls of Memento 7, a look and feel facelift and an infrastructure overhaul. They are now working on Phorest Web, which is built with Ember.js and has an embedded web browser. The article also discusses the common problems with scaling product and the approach taken to avoid having to build a Phorest Web 2 in a few years.