Recently I’ve been telling people on my team that they are the “Technical Lead” on a project. Unfortunately, I did not have a clear definition of the role in my mind. And my hazy definition of “I dunno, just be responsible for this work I guess?” didn’t help the people who ended up working as Technical Leads.
Thankfully many people smarter than me have done an excellent job of defining what a Technical Lead is. So I’m going to leverage their work to help clarify the role within my team. Maybe it’ll help your team as well! This will be the first in a series of posts about resources for being a successful Tech Lead.
Eryn O’Neil - You’re the Tech Lead! Now What?
Eryn’s background is with consultancy work and I think there are strong parallels between consultancies and ASR Custom Solutions which lead us both to need Tech Leads to do similar work for similar reasons. Let’s dig into those parallels.
First, consultants work on a wide variety of projects for short periods of time. This is similar to ASR Custom Solutions where we divide our time amongst a large portfolio of applications. Compare this to a team within a corporation that is responsible for a single service or application. On those teams people are likely to know their single application well; on my team we’re often coming to a code base with little-to-no experience.
The second parallel is that consultants do not own the code that they produce. When the project ends the application becomes the customer’s responsibility. ASR Custom Solutions does not hand ownership of code over to customers but we highly value “Shared Ownership” of code, meaning that no team member owns a project or library. Any of us could be working on any repository at any time. Compare this to organizations which assign application ownership to to a person or job title. On those teams the application or component has a clear ‘owner’; on my team ownership and responsibility is evenly shared.
These two ‘consultancy-like’ traits mean that my team members are
- Changing projects frequently
- Learning unfamiliar code
- Trusted with making good decisions
This week you might be working on a tool that you helped develop 5 years ago; next week you might be pairing with someone on a greenfield project that you’ve never seen before. Regardless of what you’re working on, your opinion of what change we should make is still valuable.
This is fun way to work but it comes with challenges! In particular, people on my team have struggled with answering these questions:
- What should we work on next?
- How do we solve this problem?
- Is this solution a good idea?
Everyone could ask the Team Lead (me) these questions, but then I would become a massive bottleneck and nothing would get done. Enter the Tech Lead! Eryn describes the Tech Lead role as, “the owner of the technical vision for a project and the technical leader of the project team.”
Which means that the Tech Lead is responsible for answering the three questions my team mates need answered. And since they can ask the Tech Lead and not me, they’ll get their answer much faster. Everyone wins.
Additionally, Eryn emphasizes that the role is temporary. The person is only performing the role for the length of the project. This is for the best as tech leads have a lot to do. Eryn lays out the following responsibilities of Tech Leads:
- Facilitate
- Remove roadblocks
- Predict and prepare for your team’s needs
- Answer technical questions
- Advocate
- Supporting your project while talking to developers, management and stakeholders
- Motivate
- Lead
- Improve processes
All of these map quite nicely to solving the problems that I saw my team mates having. Eryn’s clear description of a Tech Lead’s responsibilities has helped me understand how I want them to work within ASR Custom Solutions.
In future posts I’ll be talking about other useful talks about Tech Lead work and how Tech Leads work within ASR Custom Solutions.