“What was the single most valuable takeaway or thing I learned? That the challenges I am facing in my role are not unique to me and there is help out there!”
CTO Craft Con | Winter 2022 Attendee
2022 marks a special year in the life of CTO Craft. Not only is it the anniversary of our 5th year (happy birthday to us), but we’ve seen significant growth in our numbers and what we’re offering you as a leader in technology. But none of it would be achievable without our sponsors, coaches, Community and other supporters.
Leaders who remain agile and upbeat during a hectic and incredibly challenging period of talent shortages, an economic crisis, work pattern changes and a pandemic are inspirational, and we will continue to support you however we can in the future. We see it as our role to help to develop and educate you, make introductions, foster innovation and growth and keep providing networking opportunities where we can.
Here’s our year in a nutshell.
We’ve grown
In a quick-fire round of numbers, here’s how we’ve delivered to you and developed CTO Craft this year:
- 4,089 Slack members (an increase of 33% compared to 2021)
- 4,164 TMW subscribers
- 4,695 event attendees
Plus, we donated £200 to Breast Cancer UK and our CTO Craft team has doubled in size.
If you’re not a Community member or Tech Manager Weekly subscriber but would like to be, please get in touch.
Sponsors
Our sponsors are an essential part of CTO Craft and we love partnering with them. We now have 18 sponsors, all of whom bring something unique to CTO Craft, including Jellyfish, Albany Partners, Google Cloud and 101 Ways.
The Mighty Circles
The CTO Craft Circles are a pivotal piece of what we offer tech leaders. We understand that becoming a tech leader or CTO can be overwhelming and many questions will arise as you develop in your role. Our CTO Craft Mentoring Circles provide you with peer-led discussions, which an experienced CTO Coach facilitates, and they offer a safe environment to voice your concerns or questions and learn from others going through a similar journey.
This year we had a record of 11 circles on the go one month and had 90 Circle members.
Busy Bytes
We’ve held a hefty 38 Bytes events this year. Due to restrictions, the majority were online, but from what we’ve heard, they have been thought-provoking and inspirational.
Bytes are now finished for the year, but we’re working hard to organise the schedule for next year, and we’ll communicate some of the next events soon.
If you fancy escaping the holiday frivolities and want to catch up on any Bytes you missed, head here to listen in.
Leadership Coaching
Being a tech leader is challenging, fulfilling, eye-opening and often lonely. We believe that coaching is an essential tool to help personal and career growth and helps you to develop, understand and nurture yourself and your teams. Great leaders learn from being coached and are able to pass on what they learn about themselves to the wider organisation.
We’ve really gone for it this year by investing in more coaches who can help with your leadership development. We now have a mighty selection of 20 coaches with different backgrounds, experience and expertise.
CTO Craft Conferences
We held two conferences this year. The first, the CTO Craft May MiniCon, a one-day free event focused on the Complete Hiring Arc. The online conference featured an array of expert speakers who discussed essential aspects of the hiring arc to help you recruit talent. Topics included engineering recruitment, job advertising and candidate attraction, diversity and inclusion, selection, assessments and interviewing and how to make a convincing offer.
You can listen to the sessions here.
The second conference in November, CTO Craft Con | Winter 2022, was a three-day online event which was joined by hundreds of global tech leaders. On day 1 of the conference, we focused on Engineering and Product and day 2 was about Leadership and Alignment.
For day 3, we trialled something new; The UnConference. It was such a brilliant day and, although new to us, a real success. It was full of Lighting Talks and Roundtable Sessions, and we had such a great response for the Call for Papers that we had to select the ones we believed would be most suitable.
The replay of each speaker session is available to ticket holders now and will be released to the public early in 2023. Here’s just a snippet of the amazing feedback we received:
“I am going to be working on a number of new strategies for estimating work with my team and also looking at my own workload and what I can better delegate (thanks to the Scaling the CTO talk). Key things that stuck with me were Observability – Something I know we can be better at, and also psychological safety within teams, very interesting and something I will be exploring further.”
“The mentoring of engineers [session] gave me a great perspective into different levels and also what type of ratio you should aim for.”
“I would definitely use the tools presented by Eric Weiss for understanding what should I be doing at different stages as a CTO and self-evaluate myself.”
We’re currently planning the next conference in May 2023, which will be announced in the New Year.
Content, content, content
This year, we’ve offered you over 46 blogs, two exclusive Twitter chats and social media posts stuffed full of exclusive content. Our blogs have been a mix of thought leadership pieces, sponsor insights, interviews with CTOs and conference speakers and event overviews.
If you have any feedback on what you would like to see covered or something you would love us to feature, please contact us.
As we storm towards 2023, we’re busy developing our solutions, content, events and much more we can offer you and your business as supporters of CTO Craft.
Finally, we’d like to thank you for all your support throughout 2022.
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If you or your CTO / technology lead would benefit from any of the services offered by the CTO Craft community, use the Contact Us button at the top and we’ll be in touch!
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