The 5-Minute Startup CTO #61

Impostor advantage, Joining up discovery and delivery, Team calibration, Code analysis

Hi there,

I hope you’re well!

Here are this week’s top links on People, Product, Process and Tech.

👭 People

First, Zain Rizvi with an interesting observation on the well-know impostor syndrome: how you can turn it into an advantage, to ask the questions others don’t dare to, to take on opportunities precisely when they feel like too much of a stretch.

🥫Product

Scrum’s focus on delivering a product increment in every sprint often encourages teams to split out ‘product discovery’ from ‘product delivery’, with discovery being conducted outside of sprints, by a different set of people (product / design).

Todd Lankford points out the pitfalls of this approach, and powerfully advocates bringing discovery and delivery back together, within the scope of the Scrum team’s sprints.

🔄 Process

Team building is much more than hiring a few developers and getting them to play paintball: it is about sharing, building relationships, aligning on a common mission and on methods of working. ProductPlan explains further how you can ‘calibrate’ your team, and why this matters.

⌨️ Tech

Stephen Whitworth (from Monzo) recently explained how static code analysis tools can speed up development, by automatically analysing code for bugs, inconsistencies, and more - and recently followed this with a deeper look at semgrep.

Until next time, have a great week!

Fabrice

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The 5-Minute Startup CTO: every Sunday, 4 top insights in 5 minutes for startup CTOs and Tech Leads. Hand-picked by Fabrice, a UK-based consulting CTO.