Strategies to Turbo Charge Your Impact as a Tech Lead
When I was first given the responsibility of being a tech lead, I really didn't know what to do or how to go about it. I sure was excited though !! I went through an exploratory journey to figure out the tricks of this particular aspect of the trade. In this article, I am going to share some of my strategies which can help you scale your impact as a tech lead without being overwhelmed by the 1000 things which be thrown at you.
Weekly Office Hours
Since we had a lot of new team members in our team, I noticed that our team was often getting stuck due to lack of domain knowledge and not knowing where to start implementation. Often people spent a lot of time exploring in a wrong direction. They didn't knew from whom / where / how to get help. Few people faced technical challenges which they would spend too much time to solve. All these things impacted our development velocity.
When I became tech lead, I took a decision to have weekly tech office hours. The goal of having office hours was to remove technical and operational barriers for our team. The meeting was scheduled for 30 min initially but often used to go well over depending on no. of queries and complexity of problems. I had kept this meeting optional for everyone and didn't keep any sign up sheets. I wanted to keep this as an open forum where people can walk in and get unblocked.
If you are a new tech lead, I would highly recommend having weekly office hours. Few key benefits of this process is -
- Increased speed of execution and decision making
- Increases development velocity of the team, you will notice lesser spill overs in sprint
- Provides a forum to discuss and bounce off new ideas
- Teach people different aspects of system. Gradually building SMEs.
Delegation Matrix
When you become a tech lead, one of the key aspects of your role is to plan the projects and distribute the work in the best way possible. Since you will be expected to know almost everything going on in team, you would often be pulled into different directions to get help. This can at times become overwhelming. At least thats what I felt when I first started playing this role. Thats when I really had to learn the art of delegation.
As an engineer, I would always take issues head on and do deep dives until I find / put in the fixes. As a tech lead, I had to overcome this instinct as it would often be counter productive for me. Thats when I started to try different delegation methods consciously. The one which I really found effective is something I learned from this blog by Tyler Hawkins.
I started dividing all my requests and tasks into four quadrants based on two key parameters - frequency and complexity. Here's the delegation matrix as shared by Tyler in above article.
Another principle, which is helping me manage is DRY ( Do Not Repeat Yourself !). I am always consciously nudging and motivating my team to document everything that they do in day to day work. All processes, technical designs, testing / analytics / alerts and monitoring aspects of coding must be documented. Though this is not directly related to delegation , but I have seen a lot of FAQs getting addressed with this simple principle easily.
Bi-Weekly Coaching Sessions
I have taken up responsibility to coach at least 2 individuals on my team through bi weekly coaching sessions. Coaching is primarily focused on two aspects - technical ( this includes domain knowledge, craft skill set etc) and operational ( time management, communication, stakeholder management etc).
These coaching sessions have helped me groom people and help them improve their performance and contributions in our team. These sessions also serve as forum to get career guidance for our team.
