10 tips to become an awesome technical lead

JWORKS Powered By Ordina

Everything you want(ed) to know on your

first day as a Technical Lead and that you

can use every day from this point

onwards.

10 tips to become an awesome Technical Lead

Bart Blommaerts

ORD

INA

J

WO

RKS

Bart BlommaertsApplication Architect Ordina Belgium

@DaggieBe

JWorks

Technical Leadership

What?


What?

Technical Guidance


What?

Risks & Requirements Technical Guidance


What?

Coaching Risks & Requirements Technical Guidance


What?

Communication Coaching Risks & Requirements Technical Guidance


Do we really need one?



Everything is awesome !



Really well-functioning teams

where people share responsibilities

2 sides to a storyTechnical responsibilities vs. Leadership activities


50 %

MIZA Business Company

Technical


1. Advocate for Change

ORIENT

ACT

OBSERVE

DECIDE

Advocate for Change

Experience the same pain as

everybody else on the team

JWORKS Powered By Ordina

Everything you want(ed) to know on your

first day as a Technical Lead and that you

can use every day from this point

onwards.

tips to become an awesome Technical Lead

Bart Blommaerts

11


2. Work through Failure and Success

Things will fail

Prepare for failure

Don’t finger-point

Take responsibility

Learn from failure

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Celebrate success

Sprint celebrations

Feature complete

Congratulate the team

Congratulate individuals


3. Stay Technical

Stay Technical

Write code

Review code

Technical vision

Evolution of code


4. Always Available

Technical Design Business Project

Management

Code

Time Management

35% 25% 15% 25%

Be realistic


5. Be a mentor for your team

Mentor

Mediator

Mentor Match goals

Optimise for

the group

Effective

delegation

Mediator

Know when to give input

Know when to make decisions

Know when to step back


6. Surround yourself with other Tech Leads

Personal Level

Objectives Architecture

Interoperability

Dependencies

Organisational level

You are not alone


Leadership


7. Interviewing potential new team members

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Know your goal

Prepare

Usefulness of resumes

Don’t focus on tooling

Mindset of a Developer

Eagerness to learn

Do not use stackoverflow to find questions

1. Comfort

2. Offer options

3. Build on responses

4. Show interest

5. Bonus question


8. Embrace Cultural differences

Embrace Cultural Differences

Diversity is invaluable

Opinions matter

Shared end goal

Surround yourself

Time

Communication

Prepare work

Everybody is part of the teamOffshore?


9. Estimating is hard

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes

longer than you expect, even when you

take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Douglas Hofstadter

Quickly repurpose top innovation

before global communities.

Planning poker

Define a sequence

Set a baseline

Allow reasoning

Uncertainty is normal

(O + 4BG + P) ÷ 6

Unknown unknowns

Add 20% for - test - debug - polish - documentation - wtf moments

Solutioning

Any estimate is better than no estimate

Don’t forget the bigger pictureShare estimates

Review estimates


10. Interfacing with the outside world


Communication with

non-technical people

Go-to-Guy / Go-to-Girlfor management, the customer and other stakeholders


11. Facilitate (agile) team work

Facilitate agileBacklog

Prioritised backlog

Sprint Planning

Burn down charts

Retrospectives

…

Facilitate an awesome team


Thank You@DaggieBe

10 tips to become an awesome technical lead

Technology

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