“A masterclass in tech leadership. These insights on delivering value, making startups appealing to investors, and balancing tech debt will undoubtedly influence my work.”
CTO Craft Con: Culture and the CTO 2023 attendee
Time flies when you’re having fun, growing a Community and hosting conferences. As we speed towards the end of 2023, we’re reminiscing about the last twelve months at CTO Craft. And they’ve been really successful, and hopefully, if you’ve been involved with us, you’ll agree.
As always, we aim to develop your skills, learning and growth, provide networking opportunities, foster innovation and enable you to thrive in your role as a technical leader.
Put a number on it
We’re not ones for sitting still, so here’s a quick summary of what we’ve delivered this year:
- Over 6,000 Slack members
- Over 12,000 TMW subscribers
- 500+ conference attendees
This year, we’ve also offered you dozens of blogs and countless social media posts brimming with content. We’ve tried to keep our blogs as varied, topical and insightful as possible with a collection of conference speaker, CTO and coach interviews, salary analysis and commentary and thought leadership articles.
If you’re not a Community member or Tech Manager Weekly subscriber but would like to be, please get in touch.
Content pillars
This year, we really cemented the theme of our four content pillars, and we refer to these for conferences and other content. They are:
Leadership
- Leadership – Being visionary, taking people on the journey, motivating and delegation
- Strategy – Planning, roadmaps, optimisation and alignment
- Business – Budgets, legal, working with other departments and commercial objectives
Culture
- Culture – Psychological safety, accountability and diversity
- People – Hiring, motivating, coaching, sponsorship and professional development
- Teams – Organisational design, inter and intra-team communication and alignment
Technology
- Technology – Building software, quality assurance, architecture and choosing tech platforms
- Operations – DevOps, systems, infrastructure, hosting, security and reliability
- Delivery – Project management, agile and lean, Scrum, Kanban and product management
Wellbeing
- Wellbeing – Work-life balance, physical health, posture and relationships
- Stress – Types of stress, dealing with stress, burnout and building resilience
- Growth – Personal development, time management and career planning
We launched Campus
In October, we launched our new learning platform, Campus. This tool helps you to navigate the challenges of the CTO role with clarity and foresight by exploring hundreds of thought-leading courses, hours of video content and loads of articles. Plus, there are deep-dive discussions and panels, interviews with world-leading engineering leaders and recordings of all our Bytes events and conference sessions, tagged and searchable by theme.
Campus is a fully-fledged social network for engineering leadership learning, and the Campus Community includes discussion groups for all experience levels and team sizes.
TWO CTO Craft Conferences
Sorry to brag, but we’ve really smashed the conferences this year. Our biggest conference year to date, we’ve held two in-person sell-out conferences in London, which hosted exceptional speakers and talent, learning opportunities and gave you exposure to networking, learning, development and some rather tasty lunches.
To be specific, we hosted over five hundred attendees during the conferences, offered you 90 first-class speakers, 24 hours of exclusive on-stage content and answered 400 audience questions. If that wasn’t enough, our conferences also gave attendees 18 hours or peer to peer-to-peer networking opportunities..
And as we like to constantly challenge ourselves, we’ve decided to go even bigger in 2024. The conference will be held at the London QEII. We’ll be welcoming over 500 CTOs and aspiring technology leaders from startups, scale-ups, soonicorns, unicorns, big tech and more to tackle the biggest challenges facing the industry in a safe, collaborative and inclusive peer-to-peer environment.
Super Early Bird tickets are now available for a limited time.
In addition, there are speaking opportunities available so you can increase your visibility, raise your profile, share your research, ideas, and projects with a wider audience and get feedback from peers. Submit your Call for Papers by 26th January 2024.
Here’s a taster of some of the fantastic feedback we received from conference attendees this year:
“As a tech leader, you can often feel limited in the people you can speak to within your organisations, especially in smaller start-ups/scale-ups. CTO Craft is a great Community that gives you access to tech leaders of all experiences. Events like #ctocraftcon give you exposure to topics and relevant insights that you can take back to your day-to-day roles and teams.”
“After these two days, I am feeling less alone in my day-to-day challenges as a CTO, I have the sense that we all share the same values and desire to make an impact through the tech we are building.”
“CTO Craft Con was a well-organised event, and the care and passion of the people who put it together shone through! It really felt like a community coming together, and there was lots of great content. I even left with a couple of meaningful connections for the future! Would recommend, and will be back.”
Sponsors
Our sponsors are an essential part of CTO Craft. We have lots of great names who we work closely with across Community and events, including Gitlab, O’Reilly, Vention, Skiller Whale, Softwire, HeadChannel, Pentalog, Polly, Vorboss, Albany Partners & Growth, YLD, Sema and 101 Ways.
We also collaborated with some of our partners on surveys. We worked closely with them to design the questions, run the survey, analyse the results and share the insights and commentary with the Community.
We have more surveys coming in 2024, so we’ll keep you updated when they are open for your input and when the results will be published.
Mixers and Bytes
During the course of 2023, we held 26 Bytes and ten mixers, where a whopping 2,064 individuals registered.
Mixers, introduced in 2023, are CTO Craft events held in different UK and European cities, where CTOs and tech leaders can mix and network with peers. For future mixer events, take a look at our CTO Craft event schedule.
Some of our really popular Bytes sessions are listed below if you fancy a little break from festive celebrations:
The Post GenAI Age: the long-term impact of AI on software teams
A CTO’s Guide to Communicating the Impact of Engineering
Creating a neurodivergent & disability-inclusive workplace
Over 30 leadership coaches
Coaching is really important to us, and we believe it’s essential for leadership growth and development. We have a selection of over 30 coaches who have different backgrounds, experience and expertise and might be just the person to work with you to help you with challenges, questions or development.
Sometimes, everyone needs a safe and supportive sounding board.
Mentoring Circles continue to thrive
Our mentoring Circles have evolved and grown this year, offering even more enriching experiences for technology leaders to hone the skills required to navigate the complexities of an ever-changing landscape. We’ve witnessed remarkable success stories and created a vibrant community of professionals dedicated to elevating their leadership skills. We’re also now giving all Circles members unlimited access to our newly launched learning platform, Campus.
Our upcoming Circles promise a highly skilled range of facilitators, thought-provoking discussions and a supportive network to navigate the complexities of being a technology leader. The next group aims to go live in Jan 2024!
What’s coming in 2024
Regarding 2024, once we’ve put our feet up over the holidays, eaten too much and taken one or two naps, we’ll fly into the new year with lots of exciting plans. Campus will see further development and courses, the conference will be huge, the Community buzzing, and the opportunity for networking and knowledge sharing will be as big as ever.
If you have any feedback for us or ideas about what we could feature content-wise, just add a comment or find us in the Slack Community.
Finally, we’d like to thank you for all your support throughout 2023.
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Following two sell-out conferences in 2023, we’re proud to announce the launch of CTO Craft Con: London 2024, where we’ll relocate to the prestigious QEII venue, driven by the ever-increasing demand and growing number of attendees.
Pre-registration is now open! You can sign up here to be the first in the know when Super Early Bird tickets go on sale.
If you’re not a member of the free CTO Craft Community, what are you waiting for? With over 10,000 global technology leader members, you’ll get exclusive access to Slack channels, conference insights and updates and other valuable content. Subscribe to Tech Manager Weekly for a free weekly dose of tech culture, hiring, development, process and more.