Hello everyone, my name is Yan Chiknizov.

My experience in IT is already 6 years, and over the years I have seen many team leaders and tech leaders of various qualities, and I myself have been both good and not so good leaders. In the article, I want to share with you the experience and skills that helped me become a good leader (according to the reviews of my colleagues, of course).

Two wonderful characters will help us understand this issue.

The first is teamlid. He has at least 3-4 years of development and a year of leadership behind him! He visited both small startups and large companies, touching the bloodiest enterprise.

On the other hand, we have a developer. He already feels confident in IT: in 2-3 years, he was able to work both in one company and in small ones. But ambitions already tell him that he needs to grow. Let’s help our developer go through this thorny path and transform into a leader through skills and experience.

To do this, we will take five specific situations, based on which we will discuss how the developer will behave in this situation, and what duties the team leader will perform. Let’s discuss how in the shortest time to create a new feature and how afterwards catch an accident after it rolls out, let’s do it small legacy managementand we will hire new developers. In the end, we will discuss, as in the next time don’t reinvent the wheel.

Disclaimer. Collective images. In your company, everything may be different. I will say even more – everything is different here too – we don’t have team leaders, but we have tech leaders. Here I described the collective image of the team leader. If you don’t, write in the comments what the differences are. The article itself is my adapted report from the Alfa LevelUp Day meetup. I spent it in a somewhat ironic way. Maybe the video will convey this vibe better. Attached the video at the end.

Creating new features

So, the first case. Let’s imagine that business comes to the heroes in the person of a loved one the boss and asks right here and now, or rather yesterdayimplement a new function in the application.

The developer, observing this situation, says that he is ready to do it and write the code based on the requirements. There may not be any requirements, but he is ready for it, and will do everything to make this feature go into production soon.

Well, in the end, the developer really hopes that everything will not break, but otherwise, the developer is ready to fix it quickly.

But a team leader comes on stage, what will he do? He will first understand and discuss what actually needs to be done and whether it is necessary.

His task is to discuss a new feature with the business and generally understand whether it is needed.

After the discussion, he will probably want to implement it! But, of course, he will not do anything with his own hands. HE IS TIMLED 😅

He will find someone who will do it and, in general, will distribute the tasks between developers. Timlid has COlossal experience, so he will not just distribute, but will tell how to implement the feature and help with complex architectural points. He will also monitor how this feature is being developed and whether his team manages to do it on time!

And here’s a feature in the promotion! The teamlead gets a bonus and the developer gets a BIG THANK YOU (But with us, the developer will also receive).

What skills will help the developer to become a team leader in this case?

• This is, of course, experience – experience in developing systems and working in a short period of time. When you have already written a lot of code, finding the right solution will not be difficult.

• Soft skills. Go to business meetings more often, communicate with stakeholders and this will help you gain experience in such a difficult business. as communication with business.

• Well, some managerial tasks – the team leader constantly distributes the load between developers, he knows how to do it, because, at least, he knows how to distribute his load.

So the first advice is to start with yourself, with the distribution of your tasks and slowly grow in this plan.

And now our developer has gained some knowledge and is already able to react and perform urgent tasks yesterday. And here it happens UNEXPECTED!

Let’s imagine such a situation – the first day after vacation, the developer had a great rest, and even an evening flight will not make him upset about the next working day. He is sleeping soundly and there is a call – an unknown number on the phone screen. “Spam or scam again?” runs through his head, but the developer still decides to pick up the phone. And hears two fatal words: “prod fell”

Prod fell

And how does the developer and ice do in this case?

First, of course, ice comes into play. At least because only his phone has technical support. Lead is trying to assess what happened and how much it affected the users.

Next, he prepares a plan to solve this problem. It can be as simple as a trivial task of rolling back changes that prod missed, or more serious, for example, restoring a database.

And now the ice has a plan in hand. He will appoint those responsible and will closely monitor and control the recovery process. In some situations, he himself can raise the prod. Yes, yes, with your own hands!

And let me remind you, the developer is still sleeping all this time and dreams sweet dreams about feature coding.

But he woke up and what will he do now?

The developer gets involved in solving the problem, mostly after the fact, and tries to fix the problematic release. For this, of course, he will turn to monitoring and logs, study them and roll out the already corrected release.

See the main difference?

While a developer joins POSTFACTUM, a team leader is in the first echelon of solving this accident, he is responsible for his product, he understands what is going on inside and knows the vulnerabilities. But, in addition, he has already gone through many accidents and even initiated them himself! Through experience and mistakes, the team leader learned to deliver without unavailability.

And one more fundamental difference in these two roles:

Ice will try not to prevent problems in the futurewhen the developer just fixes it in the moment.

It turns out that it is important to discover yours the initiative and connect to the solution of the problem at all stages, rather than successfully ignoring it. That’s how, in this example, our developer was able to get one step closer to the lead.

What awaits him in the next “series”?

Suddenly The developer hears gossip, some of the members of his team have started to quit, some are already preparing to leave the close-knit community. He himself also has a hard time seeing further development in the company, because his entire current product is built on legacy!

Legacy management and those debts

And here the developer himself can take and highlight the legacies himself! And, of course, he can start implementing the strategy by drinking this legacy from the product. legacy out.

And what about timlid? Maybe he’s already preparing to lead a team consisting of him and a printer that doesn’t even have ink in it? Timlid thought about it and realized that it was necessary to introduce the 80/20 system.

This means that legacy out can be built into this 20%! And the main thing is that this process can be carried out constantly, without wasting time and resources.

And, of course, where without delegation. How about without commanding everyone?

Timlid, as I have said more than once, knows its product. He has been brewing in this industry for a long time and sees where it is going, and, most importantly, he organizes the process of getting rid of legava as a permanent, not a one-time event.

Here, our developer changed his mind about writing a statement, helped to cut all legacies and even took a small initiative and responsibility for Legacy Management.

And here all the free developers in the industry learned that there is such a company where there is no legacy! And they decided sharply, All and in one day, respond to all vacancies! Here, your cozy little community that was contained in the conversation has grown to a size comparable to the audience of the average meetup.

Team growth

The developer sees the situation and knows that it is necessary to take the initiative to become a leader. He is called to be a mentor, take a newcomer under his wing, add or update documentation and, of course, conduct onboarding!

But it will be more interesting with a team leader.

First of all, he will, of course, create an onboarding program. The program will include familiarization with the project, processes, team and management. Timlid already knows strong employees in the team and will be able to rely on them in such a difficult task as mentoring newcomers.

And then comes the most difficult process – scaling to new realities. Agree – what worked for 5 people will not work for 20 or 30. For example, if you did a retreat for three people in three hours, it is not advisable to do the same retreat for fifteen people. Tasks clearly need to be distributed differently!

And as a bonus, ice sometimes (Maybe not even yours) can be responsible for the bureaucracy and deal with issues related to other attractions of large companies.

What allowed our team leader to become a team leader in this case?

• He has already managed to work as a developer in large companies or where a constant flow of new employees has been established.

• During this time, he acted as a mentor or mentor and helped newcomers in this difficult path of a new company.

• He also saw the shortcomings of the current system and actively tried to fight them. Well, at least he highlighted them.

Our developer did not stand aside either and began to take an active part in the processes taking place within the team and the company. This allowed him to gain experience and grow to lead in this case.

But now a quarter has passed (and for some a year) and it’s a great time to set a goal!

Quarterly goals

The developer got together with the team and they decided to choose this ambitious goal!

Imagine if they didn’t have a team leader? No one would say that it is it’s all bullshit, let’s get a new one does not suit us.

Guys would work, invent, spend hundreds of hours (and time is money). And so they released this one bicycle, IIIIIIIIIIII… Nothing! They did the work to the table.

Now we forget that they did not have teams and return to the time when they came to show their plan! Well, of course the ice said it wouldn’t work, you could just use TECHNOLOGY X (insert your sweetheart here) instead of your bicycle, and in general it was already invented a long time ago:)!

Next, he will go to form goals for the team himself, which:

• will be useful for business;

• will correspond to the strategy (whether business or technical)

Of course, our team will monitor the fulfillment of the goals. And the bonus is to conduct any team and managerial activities, one to one and assessments (this is a promotion process, but not just because the time has come, but based on achievements)

And what will our developer do? He will perform and EXECUTES goals set before him, whether they are personal or business. Also, he will not forget about his professional growth and will definitely want to pass the assessment. Eventually, it will TOVOCHEL try not to reinvent the wheel!

What allowed our team leader to become a team leader in this case?

• Timlid, of course, did not want to invent the bicycle, because he himself would be responsible for such an invention. In addition, the team leader has enough bikes.

• He approached the issue of goal setting with critical thinking included.

• Timlid did not let his emotions get the better of him. We all know those nervous managers, right?)

• And soft skills allow him to effectively conduct team meetings and one-to-one meetings.

Happyend

And now we have come to the conclusion. After completing these five cases, our developer gained experience, went through the transformation from middle to team lead and is ready to perform tasks in his new role.

And finally, to generalize, who is this team member of yours?

First of all, it is a manager. But not simply, but a manager with vast experience in his field. He is a professional in his field and can make any team work harmoniously and, most importantly, fulfill the goals set before them! And all this is supported by excellent software skills

And here are the books (TIC) that our developer read and was able to get a little closer to the coveted position of team leader!

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Video reports.

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