The 5-Minute Startup CTO #44
Advice, Sprint goals, Legendary bugs
Here are your 3 picks for this week:
💡 Ideas of the week
The web is rich in advice from experienced CTOs - recent examples including Kamil Sindi, Gergely Orosz, Mickey Muldoon and Camille Fournier. All interesting but potentially also a bit overwhelming, sometimes contradicting and even ‘… so what?’
So I picked this one list of 68 pieces of advice: easy to read, to the point and quick to process as actionable / notable / disagree-reject. Note it’s not specific to running a dev team; yet several items will close to home:
You can obsess about serving your customers/audience/clients, or you can obsess about beating the competition. Both work, but of the two, obsessing about your customers will take you further.
Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.
🔄 Process makes perfect
Christiaan Verwijs with a very nice write-up of Sprint Goals in practice: a sprint-by-sprint real-word example of how his team used sprint goals to focus and guide their development work.
Sprint Goals are a bit of an overlooked technique, and it might feel like yet another bit of process… but they really help focus and save time, during the whole sprint.
⌨️ If it ain’t code, don’t fix it
Finally, mostly for fun but also because it shows how unpredictable computers can be, a list of legendary bugs.
I hope you found this useful, have a great week and stay safe!
Fabrice
Hand-picked by Fabrice, a UK-based consulting CTO. Let me know if you need help with your startup!