The Secret Life of Team Leads
There are often unexpected challenges when someone transitions from a development role to a team lead role. Oren Ellenbogen, vice president of engineering at fraud prevention company Forter, explains that a team lead has some important hidden responsibilities in addition to the explicitly defined ones.
Ellenbogen notes that the clear responsibilities are centered around delivering results on time and communicating so that work can get done in a way that does not surprise stakeholders. But he also says delivery isn’t enough. An important unstated expectation of the team lead role is to enable scalability. This makes sense, considering as you deliver successfully, people will expect you to deliver more.
But scalability doesn’t happen automatically. It’s important for a tech lead to take steps to enable scalability, such as by delegating, coaching, and developing systems.
Delegation is central to scaling an organization, but it’s also one of the big challenges most new team leads face when given the role. The transition from being “the person who fixes everything” to “the person who helps everyone else build something” is hard, but if you are spending too much time fixing problems that you can delegate instead, you are leaving the important parts of your job undone.
For delegation to be effective, people on the team may need coaching to do the assigned work. In particular Ellenbogen suggests teaching people to ask critical questions so that the team can move forward when you are not in the room.
And because a tech lead can’t be everywhere, it’s essential to create systems that help the team understand what needs work. Whether they involve tools or simply conventions for how people interact, systems help you grow faster and with more consistency.
Ellenbogen mentions another duty that is not often explicitly outlined in the team lead job description: make your people happy. If team happiness is not a priority, you can lose employees or damage the company culture, each of which affects scalability as well as your current environment.
To increase morale, it can help to think like an agile software engineer. This means clearly defining roles, setting specific expectations, prioritizing team productivity over individual productivity, making honesty and reflection part of your culture, and setting measurable goals that you track to.
We build software in teams because a team can get more done than an individual. Engineering an environment that helps teams do their best work can be a far greater challenge than any technical engineering problem. When the team works well, it can deliver better, and helping teams deliver more effectively is what being a team lead is all about.
