Some companies think of this as one type of a staff engineer. Some people think of it as a stepping stone towards becoming a staff engineer. Having a great manager is not a hard prerequisite to becoming a tech lead.
This article summarizes those mistakes and lessons. I accept this distraction because I find our daily standups very valuable from the management perspective. I could also skip, postpone or make them asynchronous. As a Tech Lead, when you make choices like this, you have to keep the organisation and the team as your priorities.
Being a senior engineering leader. Skills that you can start building already
This anti-pattern has numerous side effects including destroying trust with developers, increasing the development time of new features, and increasing the accidental complexity of your software systems. These are some of the questions tech leads should continuously ask the team and themselves. Hi, I’m Suez and I’m going to talk about some lessons learned after becoming a Tech Lead. The role of a Tech Lead varies between companies, but it is often seen as a stepping stone towards becoming a staff engineer. Tech Leads are responsible for managing the technical direction of a team and force multiplying the team’s efforts. They have the opportunity to be involved in decision-making and shape the roadmap of projects.
The company this week has published its new landing page, and is now open to requests for access from interested parties. That is, users can make high-level changes without much effort. Users can also enter their own custom code, custom components, and custom integrations.
Good Product Thinking
The lightweight process with a regular weekly meeting worked great for our team. I have used this lightweight process with a few different teams since. You still feel very busy and unproductive because you spend less time coding and more time planning and communicating.
Each week you will switch between many different tasks. You will write and review code but you will also do many other things like run meetings, maintain the Roadmap, coordinate releases with other teams and more. Don’t forget people move between these categories over time.
Align Your Team & Resources to Deliver Better Business Results
Alternatively, companies with a flat structure can forego having team leaders. Because no development project is the same, the scope and size vary. Hence, tech leaders need to evaluate the technical lead developer workload thoroughly. They also need to assess which developer or engineer works on specific tasks. They must make sure to delegate tasks to programmers who have the skill to complete them.
- So, your mileage may certainly vary here, and by a large margin.
- By using relevant and updated tools, they will ensure the scalability of their project.
- Sit down with members on your team to understand their backgrounds, their strengths, their interests and their goals to understand how the people in your team fit together as a group.
- The tech lead must collaborate with the team to identify and fix these hurdles.
- Below are what companies look for from a technical team leader.
- The tech lead makes choices regarding programming languages, frameworks, and other tools.
It is a big responsibility for team leaders to streamline information regarding the business context of the project. These pieces of information include client requirements and technical needs. Doing so will enable each member to know and fulfill their roles. A tech lead or technical leader, as the name suggests, is one of the leaders in a software development team. They are professionals who focus more on the technical side of software development projects. When you’re engineering, you can work with a whiteboard or virtual whiteboard to figure out the moving pieces and how they should interact.
They immediately kill my focus as we start to discuss different aspects of the project, some problems and blockers that require my attention, and the new surprises that should be communicated up. What is often forgotten or put at lower priority is that a Tech Lead is a manager and our management skills are the key to our success in the role. Team leads are responsible for the team’s well being.
As an intermediary between Miquido clients and development teams, tech leader coaches his team to prioritise effective communication, accurate task estimation, proactive problem-solving, and a collaborative approach. And what about the visionary and the architect role? Let me show you my take on this subject a little bit later. The engineering manager also plays an important role in determining if a feature can be built by the team by a certain point in time. The tech lead spends less time on the “why” and prioritization.
