Tag: checklist

  • 90 Day Plan for a CTO in a New Job

    90 Day Plan for a CTO in a New Job

    This is a checklist for a new CTO, head of Product, or leader in a similar role starting in a new job. It is meant to kickstart continuous improvement in your product engineering organization. I encourage you to take a scientific test and learn approach to everything you do. You should customize this template based…

  • CTO Mind Map: Culture, Technology, Operations

    In the role of chief technology officer, you have to be concerned with many topics. Some relate to functions you have direct supervisory responsibility for and some in areas that are managed by others but you still need to share responsibility for. To keep all of a CTO’s concerns organized, I created this mind map using XMind. The items are classified under…

  • 3 Roles of a CTO: Culture. Technology. Operations.

    This is a guide for CTOs, VPs of Software Engineering and other technology managers responsible for a software engineering organization. The purpose of this checklist is to help the CTO cover the areas of culture, technology and operations in their teams. It is presented in the form of a memo to direct reports. Dear Tech…

  • 3-5-7 Meeting Format for Weekly Staff Meetings

    If you are the manager of a team of people at your job, here is a format we suggest for running your staff meetings. We call it the 3-5-7 format because of its convention of giving 3 to 5 minutes per person to answer 7 questions. This system assumes that you have fewer than ten direct…

  • 5 Productivity Tips for Executives in Leadership & Management Roles

    Here are 5 productivity tips for executives in leadership & management roles. Each tip involves the number 5. Every morning (or the night before), make a prioritized list of the top 5 things you plan to accomplish that day. These are your must-do tasks for the day. At the day’s end (or when making the…

  • CAREER-CLEAR: An Employee Evaluation and Career Development System

    CAREER-CLEAR is a system for doing fair, consistent and constructive employee performance evaluations and determining employee rank, title and compensation. It is meant to be used by supervisors to identify areas for improvement for their employees and to guide their career growth. Employees are scored in a total of 5 categories. Upto 10 points can…

  • Hosting Large-Scale Web Sites: Contract Review Guide for the CTO

    If you host and operate large-scale Web sites, or negotiate contract agreements with vendors that provide such services, you need to understand what should be included in a Web hosting infrastructure. This knowledge will help you in three areas: Providing reliability, scalability & good performance Minimizing risks via security, privacy, regulatory compliance and reduction of…

  • Understanding SLA Uptime Percentages

    The table below helps illustrate why you should ensure that the “SLA Uptime Measurement Meter Reset Window” is the same duration as your billing cycle or shorter. Availability % Downtime per year Downtime per month (30 days) Downtime per week Downtime per day 90 “one nine” 36.5 days 72 hours 16.8 hours 2.4000 hours 95…

  • Checklist for Migration of Web Application from Traditional Hosting to Cloud

    In 2010, Cloud Computing is likely to see increasing adoption. Migrating Web applications from one data center to another is a complex project. To assist you in migrating Web applications from your hosting facilities to cloud hosting solutions like Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure or RackSpace’s Cloud offerings, I’ve published a set of checklists for migrating…

  • Opinion on the Amazon S3 Outage; Checklist for Dealing with Outages

    My journalist colleagues at Wired.com published some of my comments related to Amazon S3.1 Wired also posted another article titled Customers Shrug Off S3 Service Failure. I agree with the views of many of the customers expressed in the article. Don MacAskill, CEO of the popular photo hosting site Smugmug, wrote an understanding post about…

  • Personal & Business Travel Checklist

    I now maintain my travel checklist in a Notion Document (follow this link). A copy of it from Notion is pasted below. Related: I also created a checklist of tips specific to visiting Walt Disney World in Orlando with children. Big Backpack or Suitcase 💡 Whether on personal or business trips, I always end up…