No more team lead: how not to lose yourself and find yourself again
I became a team lead twice
I have this trait: to try to establish perfect order in everything, to systematize, to build processes. So I’ve always been drawn to taking on more than just coding. My first startup, let’s call it “T”, was in total chaos in the development process.
Now I would hardly start working there, but then it was very atmospheric. Just imagine. Many parallel customers. The manager went directly (and pointwise) to the developers. We often missed the announced deadlines and sat up late. I remember how one day the boss called at 20 o’clock and asked him to come to work to tweak the feature for the customer, because “he announced the deadline tomorrow morning.” But at T, we were family.
And they did everything themselves – as best they could. I remember installing Ubuntu on a rack server that one of the investors gave us. When I turned it on, it made the sound of a helicopter taking off!
There I grew up to the status of a techdirector and worked with a team of 10 people. In fact, the first, on a whim, the experience of team leadership happened there.
In D, where I came as a developer, things were different — especially when it came to processes.
The company has implemented classic Scrum: clear sprints, burndown charts, demos, planning, story points, grooming to prepare the future sprint. I was amazed at the quality of the process, wrote the code quietly and watched how everything worked. Then he became friends with the Scrum Master and started throwing questions at him. He eagerly answered and shared cool books.
I especially remember “Scrum and XP: Notes from the Front Line” by Henrik Kniberg. The process in “D” was built close to this methodology: as a result, all management and salespeople knew perfectly well when the result would be.
I also joined Skyeng as a developer. Unlike my other companies, continuous integration is excellently implemented here: every day features are released for production. On my team, the process most closely resembled Kanban.
We had an excellent team lead Petya. On one-on-one calls, we could discuss everything: from problems with not meeting deadlines to task tracker settings. Sometimes I just gave feedback, sometimes I advised something.
So Petya saw through me and learned about the experience of team leadership at T and distance learning Scrum at D.
At some point, he suggested that I hold a stand-up.
Operation “successor” in my case looked like this and took 6 minutes)
And a week later it turned out that a new direction was opening up in the company, and Petya and part of the team went to that project. The remaining guys need a new lead.
Everything happens by itself, as if the invisible Law of Attraction is pushing you in the direction of team leadership.
When a company needs a team lead and everyone thinks “Where can I get it?”, They often take from the guys who:
- better organized
- are quickly involved in team processes and ideas,
- motivated and gaining credibility in the eyes of fellow developers.
Such people are quickly noted in the management, in fact, therefore, when a vacancy appears, they go to them. So it worked for me and at least for several colleagues from other companies with whom I spoke on this topic. And it’s funny that everyone noted that the transition did not have to make almost any effort.
Here’s what the approximate terms of reference of a team lead at Skyeng looked like at the beginning of the story:
But it is one thing to take on the tasks of a team lead, and quite another to cope with them.
What has changed and how I dealt with it
The first few days you live with a feeling of euphoria, triumph and delight. Still: you are at the helm of a whole team, a stake has been made on you, you have more opportunities and responsibility! Several years have passed since leaving T, I gained experience, analyzed my mistakes, saw advanced processes and methodologies and worked on them. All this gave me strength and confidence for the second entry into the team leadership.
However, over time, the feeling of euphoria passed, and everyday life began. Here’s what I noticed.
You need to be mentally ready to part with the “nightly Zen” … and make friends with the “quarterly”. The result of a team lead’s work is usually not seen in one day or even a week. This is both a plus and a minus.