What a good Tech-Lead looks like
(Complexity + Stress) + Tech Lead = Ease and harmony
Taking more responsibilities is exciting sometimes especially for Devs to prove their ability to lead, help and manage their team, but sometimes it’s not handful for anyone or everyone then leads to bad team management in both the technical way and managerial way. So let’s define how a good Tech-lead should look like in two sides; the technical and management ones.
Technical side:
A Tech-lead doesn’t mean the most powerful magician in the team, but the best problem solver who can always find a way to manage technical issues, a good Googler, a prompt engineer (in the era of #AI), and this for sure can’t come without a good tech passion. With this role he does:
- Code review: from reviewing the code, merging it and passing the necessary steps to the DevOps team to deploy the code, the developer shouldn’t NEED to interact with the DevOps team.
- Technical refinement: this is quite alerting point, the tech-lead should have a Tiger’s eye to see all the required details and pass them with ease to the developer, make the hard task easy and especially fully understandable to the devs.
- Deployment coordination: The tech-lead should coordinate with the DevOps team to add any necessary configuration to make the code work in the Prod as it’s working in the developer’s local machine.
- Contribution to the solution architecture: Should contribute to the main architecture and suggest the most adequate tools side by side the Architect and CTO
- Contribution to the software optimization for a better quality and reliability: This comes too with helping the team to setup the testing and clean code strategies
Management skills:
First of all, A Tech-lead isn’t a manager or a boss, but a LEADER therefore the management skills and soft-skills are so important for him, since he should be able to manage the stress and pressure in a fluid way that doesn’t let the developer feel any pressure or over-load, the Tech-lead should be a strategy person who takes the client’s rush fire and transform it into easy and understandable dev-requirements.
- Should be a good listener: listening is crucial to understand your team one by one then share with them the requirements in the suitable way.
- Emotional intelligence: and this is the core of the management skills and it’s a must to make the Tech-lead handle internal issues, stress, pressure and convince with a big good smile without any bad impression or influence.
- Should be a good translator: not the literal meaning, but he should be able to understand the client’s requirements and translate them into technical ones to the dev-team.
A lack of these management skills can bring a dark cloud luck to the team, let’s see how and why as below.
What can a lack of management skills bring to the team ?
The management skills represent a unique and necessary component of a Tech-lead skills set, and a bad management can lead to :
- Loss of trust: The devs need to feel like that their leader is close to them and ready to help them deliver a good software quality together.
- Stress exposure: This is so important, because stress is anti productivity and the last thing that your dev-team needs.
- Lack of Motivation
- Misalignment with Business Goals
- Loss of talents: when it comes to stress and loss of trust then losing your team talents absolutely will come after that and geniuses will go one after the other.
Recommendation for a better Tech-Lead:
- Never expose stress to your Dev Team
- Don’t be bossy with your team so whenever you need them you’ll find them
- You’re a Tech-lead not a Tech-boss, so be friendly and stay humble
- Try to convince and don’t force your opinion.
- Focus on trust building
- Be a technical idol and build good relationship with your team
- Manage pressure but don’t expose it to your team
That’s all 🙂, and remember going fast is easy but going far needs team work with happy motivated and dedicated members.
