Feature lead
Leadership in software is not an easy skill to practice, I have the feeling that majority of people are just waiting to practice leadership…
Leadership in software is not an easy skill to practice, I have the feeling that majority of people are just waiting to practice leadership when people playing the tech lead role leave the team.
We are not preparing ourselves to be leaders, and I think one way to start is to introduce feature leaders.
Some U.S. academic environments define leadership as “a process of social influence in which a person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common and ethical task”. — in other words, as an influential power-relationship in which the power of one party (the “leader”) promotes movement/change in others (the “followers”). Some have challenged the more traditional managerial views of leadership (which portray leadership as something possessed or owned by one individual due to their role or authority), and instead advocate the complex nature of leadership which is found at all levels of institutions, both within formal and informal roles.
wikipedia
As described above, we usually think about leaders as people who are playing a role inside the team, that have a sheriffs badge, but this is not always true.
In software, we tend to move to leaders position to good developers who have been able to demonstrate ability to achieve technical goals.
The interesting part is that when this happens, we are usually under-evaluating the “soft” skills of that person that are the more important for leadership positions.
Let’s talk about tech leaders. Firstly I would say that I think a Tech Lead (TL) is a role inside a development team, I don’t think a Tech Lead can have multiple teams, that’s too much for what I think a TL should be responsible.
I learned about this in ThoughtWorks thanks to Chris Ford and his vision.
What involves to be a tech lead?
Tech Leads balance their attention across three areas.
Team
Technology
Stakeholders
A tech lead needs to understand in which stage is his/her team, let's think on Tuckman’s stages:
Forming
The team meets and learns about the opportunities and challenges, and then agrees on goals and begins to tackle the tasks.
Storming
This is the second stage of team development, where the group starts to sort itself out and gain each others’ trust.
Norming
“Resolved disagreements and personality clashes result in greater intimacy, and a spirit of co-operation emerges.” This happens when the team is aware of competition and they share a common goal.
Performing
“With group norms and roles established, group members focus on achieving common goals, often reaching an unexpectedly high level of success.” By this time, they are motivated and knowledgeable.
Then, taking into account that stage, a tech lead needs to adapt his/her leadership style to it:
Coercive leadership style, which entails demanding immediate compliance.
Authoritative leadership style, which is about mobilizing people toward a vision.
Pacesetting leadership style, which involves expecting excellence and self-direction.
Affiliative leadership style, which centers around building emotional bonds.
Democratic leadership style, which involves creating consensus.
Coaching leadership style, which focuses on developing people for the future.
Tech leads don’t need to be experts in all the technologies, they need to be able to work with them, to understand what is happening and to understand the technical gaps inside the team to find solutions.
Tech leads need to develop with the team, they cannot leave that part, if not the team will not believe in them anymore.
TLs also need to talk different languages, stakeholders product people don’t need to understand techie language, tech lead is also there to translate concepts, to teach them, in both directions.
What is the job of a tech lead?
Tech Leads create spaces where other people can be successful. For doing this, TLs need to:
Create great environments for the technical people to grow.
Being a person to trust from devs, business and stakeholders.
Find ways to impact to others.
For a tech lead the team is the focus, to succeed means for a tech lead to help to succeed the team.
This is why the TL needs to change from a maker to be a multiplier, to impact the whole team performance pushing for changing what is not working well, whatever it is.
These achievements are not something TL did, it was done by the team. TL was just a catalyst, the pride is for the team.
The last thing that a TL needs to do is to be redundant, if the TL is good doing the job, the team will not need him/her anymore.
All of this is to say that one of the jobs of a tech lead is to create other leaders inside the team, and this means to practice doing it.
Feature Lead
One way to practice tech leadership is to introduce the figure of Feature Lead, this is a way to delegate responsibilities of technical decisions to people inside the team.
This role is per feature, each feature has a Feature Lead who is the main entry point inside the team to talk about that feature.
The feature lead is a tech leadership role based on the scope of that feature, so it helps people to practice leadership skills:
They will need to talk and agree with stakeholders who don’t usually understand techie language.
They will need to agree with the team in the technical solution.
They will need to find a vision about the feature.
Tech Lead is there to help feature leads to avoid pitfalls learned in the past.
I have found really helpful to make people understand what means to be a Tech Lead inside a team when they have to talk with stakeholders, and find people involved in the change we want to do.
How to plan how to develop it, how to make it iteratively, and what stories to write.
But not necessarily being you who write the code or do all this stuff.
Give a try to feature leads to make you redundant in the team.
Stackademic 🎓
Thank you for reading until the end. Before you go:
Please consider clapping and following the writer! 👏
Visit our other platforms: In Plain English | CoFeed | Differ
More content at Stackademic.com