Depression: how to tackle it before it takes hold

Talking about mental health is something society encourages us to avoid. When my father died of pancreatic cancer when I was 12, it triggered severe depression. I remember when he died; I went…

From Zero to CTO: Joel Greensite is in the spotlight

I thought I’d be at Accenture for a year or so to pay off my ‘gap year’ debts, but I stayed for nine years working in financial services and utilities. For someone who likes change, Accenture was…

How to adopt proactive roadmaps to build the best product

There are many inflection points along the journey of any new business. This post won’t offer you a cheat sheet for success or regale you with a particularly inspirational anecdote. Instead, it…

On loyalty to your employer

I’ve just returned to London having spent the past two weeks back home in Cork where I spent an awful lot of time with my father, a man who set up his first ever email account less than a year ago and a man who has spent the past 30 years working for the same employer.

How to repair the trust of your team as a leader

I recently came across a 2016 study conducted by Edelman where they’d surveyed 33,000 people in 28 countries. From it, they discovered: One in three people don’t trust their employer. I found this statistic astounding.

Of Course Psychological Safety…But How?

I’m sorry it took so long to pull this together.

Why People Interrupt (and what to do about it)

Have you ever been speaking with a colleague, client, boss or employee and it seems no matter what you do, you keep getting interrupted? You begin a sentence, then suddenly, someone jumps in to complete it.

Why people can’t wait to quit your company

The most talented people in your company are looking for new jobs. There’s no other way to put it. Here’s the most important part: It’s your fault, not theirs.

How to Avoid Startup Suicide: Indecision

The above quote is so powerful and so true — most companies die from self-inflicted wounds than from an external force (competition, economic downturn, etc.). To expand upon this further, I believe there are two main types of startup suicide are: toxic founder relationships and indecision.

Should engineering managers write code? Wrong question.

I spend a lot of my time advising engineering managers and “How much code should I write?” gets asked by a lot of folks new to the role. Many good essays propose one line answers ranging from no all the way to 30% of your time.

How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More

Most of my coaching clients are CEOs of growing companies, and a consistent theme in my practice is the importance—and the difficulty—of transitioning from a hands-on leader who personally gets things done to someone who leads in a different way in order to be more effective as the organizatio

7 ways to prepare for an effective one-on-one meeting with your manager

Many managers say flat-out that their biggest frustration is when employees are not prepared for a one-on-one meeting. Yikes, really?

I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how.

The following is a true story. Or maybe it’s just based on a true story. Perhaps it’s not true at all. It’s been a frantic week of security scares — it seems like every day there’s a new vulnerability.

The Hour of Code around the world

Happy New Year from all of us at Code.org! Revisiting Hour of Code 2017 is a great way to get motivated to expand computer science education in 2018.

In the Lap of the Agile Gods

I’ve noticed a lot of conversation recently (mostly on Twitter) debating how prescriptive, or not, we should be when helping teams through an Agile Transformation (i.e.

Let Teams Figure It Out

In this post, I’m going to describe a team kicking off its continuous improvement adventure. My description is going to raise some questions. I’ll try to answer those questions, and end with why I think it matters. I took some time to reflect on what I was trying to get at.

Activities from Retromat

The weekly retro activity comes from Retromat by Corinna Baldauf. Do your team a favour and pick up a copy right here!

Hi, I'm Andy, founder of CTO Craft

I've been CTO or Head of Technology for a number of startups and charities since 2006, across a number of sectors, team sizes and technology stacks. If you'd like to drop me a line, simply reply to this email. I promise to reply to everyone personally.