How Was My Initial Experience as a Tech Lead

Leadership It’s not a position, is a choice that I had to take every day.

The opportunity to lead a team is something unequal, with more responsibility and meetings to talk to the entire company about several topics.

When I started in the position of Tech Lead, I noticed how different is the view of a person in the middle of three types of positions. Could understand more how the company works in terms of decisions. Became wiser when I had to talk to people.

For sure leadership is about people, and in tech, it’s no different, but the “tech” word means a lot in my daily life as a leader. Had to learn more about tech, had to understand projects inside the company, had to teach people about the projects they needed, and I didn’t fully understand yet.

Expectations should be clearly defined between me, the team, and my boss. Because then I knew how to act depending on the situation. For that, honesty is gold. Everyone is aware of everything, especially with roles and responsibilities.

All teams have one type of client, and the name of the client is Stakeholders, they are not one person or one team only, they could be the entire company or a team or two. Having many people with their own expectations concerning the projects me and my team take care. We have to manage all the demands they send to us and then deliver from time to time. That’s why we work with the Scrum framework, with 2-week sprints.

One funny thing about stakeholders, since they have their own expectations, they don’t really want to understand how the team will do what they want to be done, they just want it ready in production. That’s when I noticed that Agile should be implemented for everyone inside the company, not only the development team.

Stakeholders have their expectations and also the pressure they have to handle. When the Product Owner comes to them to understand what are their needs, that’s when I show up, to understand and translate on the technical level how to do what they need, and explain why some things they asked are not possible to do in their timeframe, especially when we work with Agile and they don’t.

With me, I have some colleagues that are also tech leaders in other teams, they have their own experience and responsibilities. Sometimes we had to work together to help our teams not worry about some non-technical stuff, or even we had to define in advance how some of our applications would work together.

Having a leaders’ team is nice because then we could cry for help when it was needed, like asking how to deal with some issues inside the team or with some project, or even learn how to deal with a specific stakeholder.

But there is one sad thing about the leaders’ team, sometimes we share little information as expected, maybe because of lack of time we all had at the moment, maybe because of pride or something. One of the most important things, the communication among all leaders, wasn’t happening, not that often, because we had too much to do with our teams.

One of the most important parts of the leader’s life, his team. It’s crucial to have a nice start to initiate a relationship with everyone because everyone is worried about the future of the team.

Since it was my first time leading a team, and part of the team was working with me in a project before, then I had to run some meetings to get to know everyone inside the team and get closer over time. Because for me it was important to gain trust, without trust it’s not possible to lead, especially when part of the team is outsourced.

When you are a senior, you have a bit more experience than others, and with experience, it’s easier to understand some things about projects, technology, and people than the less experienced ones. So, my team started to ask me for help with small decisions, because of my experience, and with those decisions, they could see results. There I noticed the trust rising, not only that, I could get closer to the team in terms of confidence and openness.

Also for me, it’s important the team can be honest about their feelings and feel safe to speak up. I could create the environment that they could do it, but I had to go first, without the leader going first and being in a position of (something about being unsafe or open), the leader can’t gain trust and their motivation to follow his vision.

With managers, the expectations need to be crystal clear, because management people will demand some actions concerning some aspects of the team or the project. While the dev team thinks in the short term, the management way of thinking is different, they think in long term, depending on who is in charge, years ahead.

I learned how direct they are, and how I needed to be clear on what to say. Focus on the solution, not the problem. Sometimes they will make mistakes and you will have to answer, anyway. For that, I had to always be prepared.

As managers, they tend to micro-manage people, it’s not all people and not all the time, but still, you will be micromanaged. One of the most important things is that I can’t micromanage anyone, despite the pressure coming from everywhere, I had to avoid this action, if not, I would create a horrible environment to work in.

After one semester working as a tech lead, I’ve learned a lot, and still have a lot to learn, because in leadership there’s no manual, for sure some experiences shared from other great leaders help a lot. But in my experience, although could be similar to other leaders, it’s my unique experience. Each personality gives a different leadership approach, that’s why I’m fascinated with the idea of leading people.

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