[civicsquid]

I think one of the biggest challenges for a team lead is understanding the team's priorities, followed by identifying and acting on the leading indicators of success towards those priorities.

By understanding priorities I mean: the tech lead has to be in sync with management (of the team and often other leaders of the org) about what needs to get done and what can be cut if there isn't enough bandwidth. Weak tech leads in my experience don't have a sufficient grasp on changing priorities, which results in the team working on things that don't get rewarded properly / don't pay off and/or loading up the team with work that could have been deferred. Some of this is the manager's job, but often it falls to the tech lead to estimate the true technical 'size' of what is being asked.

By acting on leading indicators of success, I mean: the tech lead will ideally not be doing the majority of execution on a well-staffed team. They should be doing some execution work to ensure the codebase is sufficiently easy to work in etc, but most importantly they need to know how to figure out whether or not something is on track without sinking too much of their time to do so. Setting up milestones and some target date helps with this, but it's often uncomfortable to do that with folks that were recently your peers (it still needs to be done).

I don't have books or other resources, but this has been my experience as I transitioned into similar roles. I also think my experience may skew more towards a 'manager-tech-lead' than a pure tech lead, so take that with a grain of salt. Good luck!

[steve200512]

This is an excellent article! As a team leader, the most critical responsibility is to define the company's direction clearly. Only by creating substantial value for the company will your team become indispensable,and this value isn’t necessarily tied directly to revenue; it could be efficiency gains or other strategic advantages. Throughout this process, it’s essential to continuously align with key stakeholders to prevent misalignment and quickly assess how initiatives impact the company’s product value, which helps prioritize efforts. These are insights you won’t find in books or courses,they must be earned through hands-on experience.

[Glawen]

I concur with this nice write up. Your job is now to get leadership's priorities done, identify what will achieve that goal and steer the team towards it.

My advice would be to establish a good relationship with your stakeholders, understand what they want from the team. You are now the go to person in the company representing your team. You should be always up to date with what's being done work wise by your team. Stakeholders will give you a new point of view of where your team is in the environnement. Use this POV to reflect on the usefulness of work done by your team.

Also, I don't believe a team lead should overprotect it's team, as it blurs' one view and can burn some bridges. Your team can definitly fuck up and you should tell them when they do.