Techie to Tech Lead

This is a series of stories and lessons from my very own journey of being a development team lead.

Part 2 focuses on how to build delivery capability and create win/win.

Part 3 talks about culture of team in which people want to come to work.

I love technologies and have been a seasoned software developer for 10+ years. I am also keen to having hands-on experience to build and lead a kick-ass development team. Luckily (thanks to my manager Doug Bower), since early 2017, I was given an opportunity to lead a new development team at one of the largest companies in Australia and deliver a very challenged project.

You were rockstar engineer and are now a newbie again. Being a lead, you need to change how you think and behave. You are not most important person in the team! It is the team! As a lead, you are responsible for the team so it is your job to think about how to move the team forward in a health way. You do not know where to start? In the upcoming articles, I am going to share some ideas and tips I have used to survive as a development team lead. Out of those ideas and tips, the single most important one is continuous learning about leadership, management and other related topics, and continuous improvement by constantly thinking and applying what you learn to your daily work. Be open and do not be afraid (and it is okay to fail sometimes) to try and experiment new ideas to see what works and what does not.

You may have already read and learned that, as a lead, you need to delegate tasks to team. Sounds simple, yeah? Just tell your team what they need to do. You design solution (because you were rock star engineer and you want to show your team you are qualified), figure out what needs to be done and modified, assign them to your team and wait for the success to come. You may get the desired result you want, however, it is the #1 obstacle to your team’s success because

One of the most difficult transitions for leaders to make is the shift from doing to leading. I’ve found leading is once I lean back and team leans forward which help create thinkers not order takers. There are a couple of practices I’ve found helpful when it comes to changing my behavior to build a health team.

Catchup with a mentor. There will be a lot of questions, concerns and problems which you have not encountered and you do not know how to deal with. You may even do not know what you need to do as a lead in the first a few weeks or months. Having a good mentor gives you an opportunity to learn from their experience and all you need to is to ask.

Feature lead. For any epic we build, two developers, one of which is the feature lead (every developer, if they like, has equal chance to play this lead role), pair with each other to own the solution from end to end. It also helps each developer share their experience and design thinking with each other and learn from each other. Then what do you do as a lead? You can still make a lot of contributions to team, for example,

Lean coffee. One of your daily job is to identify waste and improvements. You do not want to be the only person thinking about improvements, instead you want a team of brains to be involved thinking collaboratively what they think can be improved and come up with solutions. We found that having regular lean coffee or similar open discussion help continuously improve how we work. We also did it at the beginning of this year and it seems working well so far.

It is exciting to become a lead and see how a team work together to deliver great result. Leadership is a brand new world for first time lead to explore and there are so much to learn. There will be pain, frustration and a lot of mistakes along the journey, I hope the tips in this article and following ones will help you survive.

Further reading

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