Newsletter #76 : US Election, Testing

Our testing lectures are amongst the most watched from our online course material and this week we spotted a report from our friends at CTO Universe that looks in further detail at the topic.

“Up to 80% of new products fail. The reality is harsh and the reasons why are endless. Perhaps the new product couldn’t oust a customer favorite. Maybe it looked great but was too hard to use. Or, despite being a superior product, the go-to-market strategy failed.

There’s always risk when building a new product, but you can hedge your bets by understanding exactly what your customers’ expectations truly are at every step of the development process”

Check out their report Testing at every stage of development for additional tips and real-world customer examples.

How to Hire an External CEO

The sweet spot for our Careers Team is helping match companies and candidates for senior tech roles but this week we had an unusual request from one technical start up founder, who needed help and advice on how to find and qualify a CEO.

For those of you who are founders or early hires then it might be a scenario for you in the future – having to recruit, perhaps for the first time, an external CEO hence an interesting article from Andreesson Horowitz that explores the challenge, particularly from a technical co-founders perspective.

 

Live Webinar Q&A on 11th November   “Next Generation Enterprise” The Future of Work & Tech Leadership

About The Event

As tech leaders and managers we are accustomed to dealing with change as a constant, it comes with the territory. But even the most visionary amongst us are having to deal with an ever faster pace of disruptive change much of it super charged due to COVID.

Next Generation Enterprise is a live webinar Q&A series that will explore The Future of Work For Technology Leaders. Every month we invite guests from in and around the tech world to explore what the future of work could look like and how tech leaders might need to adapt.

For this first event, host Rameshwar Balanagu will be joined by Shail Khiyara who is Executive in Residence at AV8 Ventures and research fellow at HFS Research in Silicon Valley. He is also a board member at IQPC, an Artificial intelligence & Intelligent Automation Network with more than one million members. With 20 years C-suite experience in CMO roles, he brings some fascinating insight into the potential fusion of elements of the CMO and CTO roles.

This will be a Live Webinar Q&A and we’d love you get involved with some questions for host and guest.

Date: Weds 11th November 2020.
Midday CT
1800 GMT
1900 CET

Find out more and register here. 

Book Of The Week : No Rules Rules

Away from work I generally read non business books, just to switch my head into something different for a while.   But this week I have been diving enthusiastically into No Rules Rules, a book about the culture that drives and has driven Netflix to such fantastic success. Some really interesting observations about how to reinvent a business from the top down and how to adopt and make successful some fairly radical approaches to communication, not least their adoption of radical honesty. Amazon review … “they explain in more detail the culture of Netflix. A culture that prioritises innovation. It is a book that must be read as it represents an innovation in company culture (Netflix, for example, does not use KPIs, management by objectives or bonuses, among others). Their culture is a culture of Freedom and Responsibility, where they have some principles (Maximize the talent density in the company, always give honest feedback, eliminate controls (lead by context), become a global company)”

CTO Academy  Book your free coaching session Want help with an immediate managerial issue or discuss where some coaching can help your career?   We offer a free discovery coaching call where you can chat in more detail about the issues and explore where coaching can help you make a bigger impact.  If you haven’t done it already, you can also Download our eBook

Have a wonderful weekend …

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