Anna Shipman's blog
Last week I had a really enjoyable conversation with Joe Bignell on his podcast, Joe’s room. Some of the things we talked about: The value from AI doesn’t just come from adoption, it comes from changing how your organisation operates around it. Now that coding has got so much faster, we can see clearly that coding was never the bottleneck; competitive advantage comes from where AI is embedded in…
It’s no longer defensible for CEOs and boards to outsource understanding AI to their technology execs. I partnered with CxAI on a post about the three key principles that will enable execs to build that understanding. The post is below. This week, we’re shifting gears. Not to what AI can do for consumers and businesses, but to a more uncomfortable question: as an executive or board member, are you…
Earlier this week I was on a panel with some excellent peers discussing AI and engineering productivity. We discussed how to measure engineering productivity; tactics for driving adoption; how this might change how we structure our teams and the impact on junior engineers, among other topics. Here are my notes. Photo (c) Matthew James Some of the most interesting themes that we discussed were: AI…
Have you ever had the experience where you make a great proposal to your Engineering leader and it languishes for weeks and then comes back with a no for reasons that don’t seem to make sense? Or your Engineering leader is keen, but they too report that it has gone into the higher levels of decision-making and not returned, or has come back with a no for unclear reasons? As a CTO, I know that…
Never split the difference is a very interesting book. The pitch is a book on negotation by a former FBI hostage negotiator, but I found it to be a useful and practical guide to communication in general. Here are my notes. Negotiation is communication with results The author, Chris Voss, spent many years as an FBI hostage negotiator and his contention is “life is negotiation”. He points out…
In March I gave a talk at CTO Craft Con that bought together a number of topics I’ve been thinking about for the past few years: how to be a great technology leader, being the best you can be at your job, and the true role of a CTO. Becoming a successful technology leader requires skills in three core areas: people, process, and technology. Each leader has unique strengths in these areas, and…
An important part of hiring is making reference calls, and this becomes more important the more senior the role you are hiring for. By the time of the reference call you have invested a lot in this final candidate and you want to make sure you give them the best chance of success in the role. Often your recruiter will make reference calls but I make at least one call myself, ideally to a previous…
Here is the video from my panel at the SaaS CTO conference . We talked about: What does it mean for a technology to be transformative? How critical it is to be able to articulate tech in terms of a user need How to communicate to others in the business about the risks and potential value of GenAI Advice for people experiencing pressure to include it in their stack (e.g. by VCs) and suggestions as…
When I started a recent role, my exec team peers were working on the three-year strategy using a framework outlined in Playing to Win . I have been really impressed by the work and the outputs, so I read the book. Here are my notes. What would have to be true The most valuable idea in Playing to Win is the process it outlines for how to make strategic choices. Creating a strategy often requires…
I joined Kooth as Chief Technology Officer just over a year ago. Kooth has spent the last two decades building digital mental health services for young people to help provide early and responsive mental health support. I recently shared my reflections on my first year with the team, and wanted to also share them here. It’s incredible to work on such a meaningful purpose One of the things that drew…
I was really happy to join Mal Minhas and Chris Evans on a panel at The SaaS CTO conference . Moderated by the excellent Jon Topper, we covered what criteria we use to differentiate between genuinely transformative technologies and overhyped trends, how we communicate the value and risks of adopting new technologies to stakeholders outside of technology, and what advice we’d give to a tech leader…
I did an excellent course on Strategy for Directors . On Monday, I shared some models we learned about and in this post I pull those together. Whether you are in leadership or not, you can use this process and the models to help your strategic thinking. If you prefer to watch rather than read, I covered a lot of this in my talk Analysing, Deciding, Doing: How to develop and execute an effective…
Following on from the great IoD course on finance , I did their Strategy for Directors course. I have split my notes into two parts. In this post, I will go through some models, with explanations. Then, in part 2, on Wednesday, I will tie it together. If you prefer to watch rather than read, I covered a lot of this in my talk Analysing, Deciding, Doing: How to develop and execute an effective…
Last week I joined Luca Rossi on his podcast Refactoring. We had a great conversation about technical strategy and how that has looked in different places I’ve worked, how to communicate and work on strategy, and my own journey in tech. You can watch the episode here or listen to it on Spotify , Apple , Overcast or other podcast apps.
I recently joined Pat Kua on his Managing Managers podcast. We had a great conversation about many topics including strategy vs tactics, how to split your time as a technical leader and about my CTO role at Kooth , digital mental health for children and young people. You can listen to it on Spotify or on the Managing Managers site with show notes and a transcript. PS. We are hiring , in the UK and…
A format I have found useful for making proposals is 1-measure-3-1. This is a variation on the 1-3-1 problem-solving method ( nice summary here ), focused specifically on proposals. 1-measure-3-1 1 : one problem to solve or opportunity to grasp Measure : how will we know it’s solved/the opportunity is met. What metrics are we looking to shift, or outcomes are we looking to achieve? 3 : three…
A couple of years ago I worked on a strategic project that was outside my remit. It was an incredible learning experience for me and here is some of what I learned. The problem I wanted to solve The problem for my team was that our tech estate was in contention. I was leading one of a number of engineering groups within a larger organisation; each group had its own priorities, but most of them…
I recently read Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe. I was first interested in it because it was reviewed in the Economist (paywall) and then an excellent colleague of mine recommended it. Here are my notes. This is an enormous book It’s about 500 pages, hardcover and structured like a textbook. My colleague Aaron Lawlor suggested the format may be because it is aimed at…
In June 2023, I delivered a talk at Turing Fest on how to create a strategy. This talk is the one I would have liked to have seen when writing my first strategy: how you actually do strategy. Watch the talk! The slides are here: Summary of the talk: models and techniques to help you create your strategy In the talk, I go through some specific models, with examples. Analysing the situation: how to…
Earlier this year, I keynoted the second day of CTO Craft Con: The Strategic CTO , and the video is now available: You can also read more about the discussion in my write-up .
I keynoted the second day of CTO Craft Con: The Strategic CTO . The topic was strategic technology leadership. This is a write-up; you can watch the video here . It was a fireside chat I was in conversation with the excellent Emma Hopkinson-Spark . Emma kicked it off by asking what strategy actually is, and how it’s different from roadmaps, initiatives, tactics etc. That gave me an opportunity to…
I have recently read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People . It was not what I’d expected, and very good. Here are my notes. A lot of it seems familiar I resisted reading this for a long time because it seemed the most self-helpy of the business books on my list. However, it’s referenced all the time. Some of the principles I already try to follow, for example ‘put first things first’ and ‘begin…
A few weeks ago I joined Neal Ford on his Software Architecture Hour to talk about technical strategy. I really enjoyed this conversation; we covered a really broad range of topics, mostly driven by audience questions. We talked about building strategy and selling it, how to do architecture across big groups, how governance can not be a dirty word and more. If you have an O’Reilly account, you can…
Just over three years ago, I wrote about the tech strategy for Customer Products, No next Next . In this post I talk about how we’ve implemented our strategy, what the outcomes are, and what we are going to do next. Next brought a faster, coherent user experience “Next” replaced our previous FT.com site, which was powered by a monolith, called “Falcon”. Falcon could only be deployed monthly, out…
When working on tech strategy I like to involve as wide a group as possible. During the pandemic, with remote and hybrid working, this become more difficult. This post is about a way we found to define the 2022 tech strategy that worked well. It’s important to involve a wide group in tech strategy The ideal when working on tech strategy is to involve a wider group of senior and principal engineers…
Last year, I read the excellent and very interesting Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks (though in somewhat more than seven weeks). This is a very long post with my notes from reading it. TL;DR: you can follow along with the book using my Vagrantfile I created a Vagrantfile to run the code samples in. You can use this to follow along with the book. There are a couple of places where the code…
At the FT we have a role called Principal Engineer. Many companies do; however, the shape of the role at the FT is different than it is at many other companies, so in this post I explain what the role is like on my team, Customer Products. And if you are interested, we are hiring a people-focused Principal Engineer right now! We have durable, multi-disciplinary teams The Customer Products group is…
I delivered a talk at the inaugural London LeadingEng conference on how to set a tech strategy, specifically after the launch . This was an updated version of my talk from Continous Lifecycle London in 2019 . It was planned to include learnings one year on, but the original LeadingEng was scheduled for summer 2020, so by the time we had the conference, I was able to include learnings three years…
On Tuesday, I delivered a talk at QCon London: No Next Next: Fighting Entropy in Your Microservices Architecture . This was my first in person conference talk since 2019, and I really enjoyed it. I got some great questions after the talk, including questions about: how we set up durable teams (you can read more in the blog post Unlocking value with durable teams ); how we handled teams suddenly…
If you want participation in a meeting with people who don’t spend a lot of time together, one thing that can help is getting everyone to say something at the start; here is a low-pressure way to do that. Speaking up in a meeting with new people requires confidence It can be hard to speak up in meetings. When you’ve worked with the same group of people for a while, it gets easier, but if you are…
Yesterday, I delivered a talk at LeadDev Together : The good, the bad and the tech strategy. I covered what strategy is and what makes a good strategy (both very much distillations of the excellent Good Strategy, Bad Strategy ), and then I talked about what a good tech strategy looks like. My slides are below and I will post a link to video when I have it.
I recently couldn’t work out why Clojure was not working concurrently in a Vagrant box. I didn’t solve the problem, but I learned many things, and here are some of them. I use Vagrant for most things I do I love Vagrant . I love being able to put things down and pick them up where I left off, without having to recreate environments. I do not have a good memory, and the Vagrantfile is built-in…
Two years ago, I wrote about how as a technical leadership team we can figure out what to work on . We made some changes to the way we worked and found them really beneficial. However, last year we realised there were flaws in how we were working, which made it hard for us to prioritise the bigger, more impactful pieces of tech work. Here are the changes we made to address that. We still have some…
Threat modelling is a way to identify the potential security flaws in your system, and prioritise mitigations. On Monday I attended a session comparing some card games you can use to help you, at SPA conference . This is a brief write-up. The purpose of threat modelling cards is to provoke discussion There are various ways to do threat modelling, for example the National Cyber Security Centre…
We wanted good WiFi coverage in our house and we did not have it, so we set up a Ubiquiti network. This is how we did it. Options for getting good coverage There are three ways to get good WiFi coverage in your house: Use a repeater (also known as an extender or a booster), like a TP-link range extender . Use mesh networking, like a Netgear Orbi . Have multiple wired access points. 1. A repeater A…
This is the third of three posts summarising some very interesting things I learned about finance on a recent IoD course . In part one I talked about funding and financial statements, in part two I talked about accountancy principles and ratios, and today I will talk about deciding which projects, and which companies, to invest in. Weighted average cost of capital (WACC) It was at this point of…
On Monday I published part one of three blog posts about finance , finishing with a quiz. In this post I will share the answers to the quiz, then talk about some important accountancy principles and some ways of thinking about the financial health of companies. In part three on Friday , I will talk about methods for evaluating projects and companies. Answers to the balance sheet quiz Here are the…
A couple of years ago I got some excellent training on finance from a finance director at the FT . At the end of last year I went on a longer, more intensive course from the IoD , aimed at non-finance directors, and I learned LOADS. In this post I will cover some important principles about company finance, sources of company funding and financial statements, and include a quiz! In the follow-up…
Last month I facilitated a panel at Lead Dev Live about how to build an effective tech strategy. The panel were absolutely excellent: Randy Shoup , VP Engineering and Chief Architect, eBay, Anand Mariappan , VP Engineering, Impira, Nimisha Asthagiri , Engineering Director and Chief Architect, edX and Papanii Nene Okai , Director of Engineering and Architecture, Venmo. They all had a lot of great…
I recently went on an inclusive leadership course at work. It was very interesting. There were four particular lists that I wanted to make a note of to refer back to: Do these Be bold about getting names right Start conversations about culture Explore how your culture affects others Learn to tell people of different ethnic groups apart Get a cultural calendar Be transparent about cultural norms…
Last week I gave a keynote at CTO Craft conference based on my blog post about moving to durable teams . It was an outline of why and how we made the move, and my reflections on how it’s gone, one year on. The slides are on Slideshare , and video of the talk is on Vimeo .
Prompted by some discussions at work, I recently read Turn the Ship Around! I enjoyed it. Here are my notes. Making followers into leaders in the Navy I had previously seen a talk about the concepts by the author, L. David Marquet. Recently, one of my team shared a link to this short video (10 min) when we were having a discussion about how to take more ownership, and I thought I would read the…
Even if we don’t work in sales, we often need to sell something: an idea, a course of action, or ourselves (e.g. in a job interview). It’s a useful skill to have in your toolbox. I recently had a very useful conversation with the excellent Jon Slade , who is the Chief Commercial Officer at the Financial Times, and he outlined some sales techniques. Let me take away that pain you feel When I wrote…
When I joined the Financial Times as Technical Director for FT.com, I inherited a team of around 50 engineers. One of the first things I did was meet each of them for a one-to-one. I was initially resistant, but it was extremely valuable, I’m glad I did it, and I would definitely do it again in a future role. My mentor’s advice about the content of the meeting The idea was suggested to me by a…
On Monday I was on a panel, organised by Codemotion, about technical leadership. It was a great discussion, with extremely impressive co-panellists Omosola Odetunde and Pat Kua , and well faciliated by Piergiorgio Niero . We discussed three main areas: What challenged each of us the most as a senior technology leader at different stages of our growth. What we delegate, and what are the key…
Over the past six months, my group at the Financial Times has moved from project-based teams to durable teams. In this post I’ll explain why we made that move and how this is helping us deliver bigger and better things for our customers. We want to be able to deliver as much value as possible Our goal on Customer Products is to make FT.com and the iOS and Android apps be as good as they can be for…
We are coming up to mid-year review time in my group at the FT, and two brilliant engineers on my team, Glynn Phillips and Charlotte Payne , decided to run a session for the other line managers in our group on why we have this process. Glynn said they were thinking about it at a broader level: “It could be easy for us to answer the “why do we do this” question and it still sounds to some people…
I recently found myself having to use mod_wsgi , an Apache module which can host Python web apps that support the WSGI spec. The docs say that you shouldn’t attempt to use an app dependent on a framework like Django until you’ve got a basic ‘Hello World’ app running first, which will validate that “you at least understand the basics of configuring Apache.” That’s kind of patronising; I do at least…
I was meant to go to Nottingham this week to give a talk about tech strategy. It was going to be a follow on from my talk at Continuous Lifecycle, After the Launch: the difficult teenage years – where are we a year later and what have I learned? In the circumstances, travel to Nottingham was out, but the brilliant folk at Tech Nottingham have gone online , and I was able to give the talk in a…
With our whole team suddenly working from home, we’ve put in a regular Friday 3pm “remote social” for the whole of Customer Products, a team of about 60 people. The idea is to help with the loss of the casual chat and social interaction we get in the office. Last Friday, for the first one, I ran a remote quiz. The technicalities We did it on Google Meet, (as a meeting rather than a live stream)…