Even the best CTOs started with an “Hello World” (2/2)

In my first article, I wrote about the different ways you can make sure you never stop learning, and why it's so important in the long term.

I would like to go further and share some resources that may help you establish a learning routine for yourself.

Advanced methods to invest in learning

The local community

Meetups, conferences, slack communities, are all great ways to learn about tech, it’s difficult to always be up to date, but it’s our job to understand why serverless is (or is not) the future of our project, and hints from the community are what makes you prioritize your next readings.

Whyse is on a mission to make this a reality for everybody, and I thank them for that 👏.

For those of you who are based in France, here are some slacks I love :

• ParisRB, a slack about ruby (and Rails, Sinatra, etc.), it’s very active and there is always someone to help
• FranceJS, a slack about JS, there are channels for vue, angular, node, react, etc.
• Xpedition Guilds, if you are a product owner, manager, or anyone who works in a product team, this slack is made for you

Reach out

It’s always difficult to make the first step, like when you’re in a bar trying to flirt with this incredible person you glanced at the whole evening, yet, you are far less likely to get rejected (talking from experience) and far more likely to end up discussing passionately about a topic you both love when it comes to reaching out a tech peer.

Reaching out is key when it comes to growing as a tech leader, and even when you discuss with someone whose situation is really different than yours, he or she will often have great insights to make you go forward and take important decisions with a better overall understanding. The best way to avoid making a bad decision is by challenging it with people out of your micro-ecosystem (your team and you).

I follow some simple principles to make sure I continue meeting new awesome people and I’d like to share them with you :

• Give yourself an objective, I must meet at least one new person in the tech industry and one manager every month
• Do not overengineer the reach out message, just tell the person you want to meet to expand your network and share about best practices
• Make sure you do not only meet seniors, meeting juniors is incredibly useful too, it accelerates the evaluation of your own situation and helps you structure your thoughts by explaining it (Docendo discimus).
• Always answer to people who reach out to you, even if it is to say you do not have time

Hire people that are better than yourself

This probably is the most difficult thing to do, especially in the tech industry. Most people think it is only because great developers are rare (and they are), but it is not likely the main reason you have not hired someone smarter than yourself yet.

For far too many entrepreneurs, ego is the biggest obstacle that keeps them from reaching their full potential
Eric Siu, Growth Everywhere

Here are the 3 top reasons why we should all try to hire people better than ourselves:

• You will learn from them, a lot!
• You are more likely to listen to their thoughts, and debating is one of the best way to make important decisions
• They will become your biggest asset (Team is everything)

And here are some hints on how to hire smarter people :

• A great Salary / Equity ratio. You cannot drive motivation only by salary in a small start-up, and if you find great profiles, not only should you propose them equity, you should insist on them having some. Salary is what you get for a job well done, equity is what you get for holding a company's long term vision.
• Responsibilities. Talk to them about managing their peers, recruiting other developers, being responsible for a part of your stack, it's important that they understand they are part of the company strategy.
• An awesome vision of your product. They will join you because you believe in something, and it's your job to make sure they believe in it too. Software engineering is one of the most satisfying job in the world, because you know you can create the awesome, so make sure they understand what is awesome about your product.

Get feedbacks from your team

If you had to remember only one thing from this whole post, it should be this one (just kidding, the other things too). Learning to be a better developer is not so difficult, and I believe anyone who is willing to work hard and learn will achieve that goal. Learning to be a good manager is a completely different story, and even if you read all the great books about management, you still can be a bad one if you do not spend enough time listening to your team. If you have no idea what your developers think about your management style, you are probably not doing it right.

One of the most effective way to address this is by giving each member of your team a specific time slot dedicated to feedbacks and management topics. Most people call it a one-to-one interview.

Here are some things I learned along the way :

• One-to-one are the absolute weapon a manager needs, as it helps you reconnect with your team, their motivation levels, etc. But it's also a way to understand what you've done wrong, and what you'll do better
• If you don't know what to talk about, simply ask these questions (the order is important) :

1. The team : What do you think about the team ? Is there someone that has been particularly performing ? Do you still enjoy the atmosphere ? What could we do better ?
2. Me : What do you think about me ? Is there any example of management issue I did not handle well ? Is there any example I did handle well ? How can I be a better manager ?
3. You : What do you think about yourself ? Do you think you've been performing at top level ? What could you do better ? Are you still learning ? (I would usually give my honest feedback after this question)

• Do it often, once a month is a good start
• It should be based on honesty, a developer who is under or overperforming should know it right away, it either encourages him to continue doing his best or help him understand how to get back on track

カンパイ 🍶

I just read this book and I loved it : "Clean code", if you want your team to code better, they should all read this book.

My stories are mainly written for any tech manager leading a team of 1 (omg, I need to do everything here) to 20 (omg, why do I (think I) still need to do everything here) developers. Why ?

Btw, if you're a developer, I'm hiring => https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-thimothee

There are a decent amount of books, events, talks and coaches for CEOs but we hear very little about the struggles of being a CTO. I get it, talking about mistakes we made learning on the job isn’t glamorous, it’s actually quite embarrassing and painful to think about. But part of this exercise is therapeutic, the other will hopefully help current or future CTOs. Building confidence as a CTO

About Kerala Ventures

The Kerala team is insanely focused on bringing massive support to its entrepreneurs in tech, operations and hiring (see first20.club). We have a unique know-how in developing startups from scratch to “unicorns” (Lafourchette, Doctolib, see our story)

Kerala Ventures invests from 100k€ to 1.5m€ at Seed stage, or at the creation of startups

Enjoyed this post? Tap the little 👏 below