Ask HN: What has helped you transitioning from a technical to a team lead role?

6 pointsannnoo11mo ago5 comments

Hello everybody, About 4 months ago I got the opportunity to become the so called team lead of our dev team… and this is something I really underestimated :D

Previously I was (and still am in the team) a full stack developer with strengths on the technical side as well as very good problem understanding and solving skills.

After the previous months I more and More understood that in my role I have to manage a team, talk more with stakeholders and getting more involved into “politics”, which is not something I’ve did previously very much.

I know that I have to improve my communication skills, getting better in understanding how I can protect my team and how to lead my team to get out of disruptions or things that are impacting our team, but sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed. It is definitely a challenge, but one that I want to grow on.

Thereby I am asking: Has someone of you being in a similar position and what helped you to become the team lead that you wanted to have? Were there useful resources, books, programs that taught you valuable skills for this kind of role?

Thank you :)

5 comments

civicsquid11mo ago

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!

steve20051211mo ago

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.

Glawen11mo ago

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.

revskill11mo ago

Get to know well your teammates.

Communication and understanding is key.

You need to wear many hats.

Planning well is inevitable.

Tradeoffs and creativity is essential.

austin-cheney11mo ago

They probably promoted me to lead because I am a field grade military officer in my part time job. It certainly wasn’t because I was working hard. Nearly all my promotions in both the corporate world and military have been involuntary, now that I think about it.

Things that also helped:

* superior writing skills. It’s the ability to supply superior precision in the fewest number of words.

* getting shit done. It’s the ability to accomplish all the things assigned to you urgently and without error. My goal is to clear my plate of all currently assigned tasks so that I can space out.

* taking care of people and managing operations. There is a lot to this but I have more than 20 years experience in management from the military side so it’s just second nature for me now.

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