Spicy: The Tech Leadership Cookbook
Spicy: The Tech Leadership Cookbook
Your guide to building a successful, high-performing tech department. For CTOs and Engineering Managers.
About the Book
At its core, "Spicy: The Tech Leadership Cookbook" is your guide to building a successful, high-performing tech department. Whether you're a seasoned CTO, engineering manager or new to the role, these recipes will provide the tools and insights you need to lead with confidence and effectiveness.
You'll learn how to design and implement effective strategies for tech departments to meet performance, scalability, reliability, and security goals. Each recipe includes one or two problem statements, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for solving them, as well as examples using real-life scenarios, team dynamics, and organizational structures.
You'll also receive implementation guidelines, and a discussion of the pros, cons, and trade-offs that come with each solution.
- Learn how to establish a purpose-driven tech department for success
- Discover how to set Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for focus
- Implement an Agile Roadmap for effective planning
- Make meetings productive and ensure things get done
- Understand how to structure teams within your department for optimal performance
- Learn how to deal with single points of failure and ban acronyms
- Master the art of announcing difficult decisions and delivering end-to-end
- Understand how to optimize onboarding, deal with underperformance, and make remote teams work
- Learn the importance of Product Owners, customer feedback, and informed decision-making through analytics and metrics
- Discover how to measure the performance of your teams, integrate security into your development cycle, and deal with tech risk and tech debt
- Learn how to ensure your cloud computing costs don't spiral out of control and how to ensure teams perform well in case of incidents
- … and many more actionable recipes
About the Author
Table of Contents
- About this book
- General Organization of the Tech Department
- Purpose Is the Basis for Success
- Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for Focus
- An Agile Roadmap for Planning
- Multi-Focus Is Deadly for Teams
- How to Make Meetings Productive and Get Things Done
- Essential Meetings for Your Department
- How to Structure Teams in Your Department
- Organizational Chart for Clarity
- How to Organize the Documentation of Your Department
- How to Deal with Single Points of Failure
- Ban Acronyms
- Announcing Difficult Decisions
- Always Deliver End to End
- Clear Ownership for Teams
- Culture
- How Your Department Benefits From Retrospectives
- Tolerating Failure is the Prerequisite for Innovation
- How Post-Mortems Help to Improve
- Pre-Mortems for Project Success
- Checklists - For Everything
- Celebrate Success
- Traits of High-Performance Teams
- How to Deal with Toxic Team Members
- People (HR)
- Optimize Onboarding
- What to Do When Employees Leave
- Sourcing Employees is Your Responsibility
- How to Establish Career Ladders
- Hiring the Best People Consistently with a Structured Hiring Process
- How to Get Feedback From Teams Before Problems Pile Up
- Team Maturity Is a Crucial Concept for Successful Team Formation
- How to Identify Underperformers
- How to Deal with Underperformance
- How to Make Remote Teams Work
- How the Pomodoro Approach Can Help to Foster a Remote Team
- Product Management
- Product Owners - Not Project Managers
- Get Feedback Quickly from Customers
- A Roadmap is NOT a Wish List
- Analytics and Metrics For Informed Decisions
- Acceptance Criteria to Define When a Feature Is Finished
- Use Internship Programs to Connect Engineers with Users
- Follow-up on Customers Quitting Your Software
- How to Run Your Product Development Teams
- How to Visualize What’s Going on in Your Teams And Hold Everyone Accountable
- Engineering
- How to Measure the Performance of your Teams
- A Tech Radar Guides Your Engineers
- True Continuous Deployment Boosts Productivity
- Maintain an Overview of Your Services and Systems
- Ownership for Services and Systems is Essential
- How to Integrate Security Into Your Development Cycle
- How to Unblock Engineering Teams That Are Waiting for Other Teams
- How to Deal with Tech Risk and Tech Debt
- Outdated Systems and Libraries: A Ticking Time Bomb
- How to do Pull Request Reviews
- How to Make Sure Software Works and Can Be Developed Further
- How to Make Sure Your Cloud Computing Costs Don’t Kill You
- How Teams Perform Well In Case of Incidents
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