The 5-Minute Startup CTO #65

Breaking shyness, Product conferences, Limiting work-in-progress, Pre-flight checklist

Hi there,

I hope you’re well! Here are this week’s top links on People, Product, Process and Tech.

👭 People

Providing candid feedback is key to supporting colleagues in their personal development - but natural impulses can often make that difficult…

Aviv Ben-Yosef explains how to ‘break shyness’ with four to-the-point pieces of advice.

🥫 Product

ProductPlan with a good list of 14 conferences for Product Leaders, mostly remote and/or on-demand. Great to see how many opportunities are out there - take your pick!

🔄 Process

Increasing focus is pretty much a sure-fire way to improve teams and organisations. Daniel Truemper digs into the topic of limiting work-in-progress: why, how and key insights. A must-read if your team suffers from this, and something you can and should act on right away.

John Cutler @johncutlefish

recommending less work in progress/process is almost cheating...bc so many companies are operating above optimal WIP, you'll almost always be right. then again, there's theoretically optimal ... and optimally meeting the desire to look (and feel) extremely busy

⌨️ Tech

One benefit of doing technical tests during interviews is to observe if candidates jump straight into the solution, or take time to question the problem first. So what is your pre-flight checklist when taking on a coding task?

This blog post suggests a few aspects to consider. My personal pick: from your user’s point-of-view, what will be the outcome, and can you make a test to validate that?

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.