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The intersection of technology and leadership

Category: Teams (Page 1 of 8)

5 Tips for Being an Effective Tech Lead

February 26, 2018 / / 2 Comments

Becoming a Tech Lead is a tough transition for any developer, because only part of the skills and experience you had as a developer prepares you for the expectations of a new role. Instead of simply designing and writing code, a Tech Lead is suddenly responsible for an entire development team – and this means dealing with people, both technical and non-technical.

The time a developer spent focusing on writing well-designed code does not translate into the skills necessary for understanding people, resolving conflict, or suddenly having to juggle more tasks than they can possibly achieve by themselves.

Tech Lead Dilemma

I present 5 tips for being an effective Tech Lead.

1. Learn to Delegate

As a developer, you get a kick from working out what the hard, technical problem is to solve. You research different ways to solve the problem, seek the most simple solution and celebrate a victory when you want that red, failing test going green.

As a Tech Lead, you cannot take on all the coding tasks, and cannot take on all the hard or interesting problems, regardless of your experience. You have many more responsibilities that need time and attention, and if you are focused solely on a single task, those other responsibilities will fail to be fulfilled. When you take on the harder problems, it also misses opportunities for other developers to grow and problem solve, which will lead to frustration and potentially people leaving your team!

Of course, there are some problems when your experience and knowledge are important, but you do not want to be a bottleneck in solving problems, so you want to find a way to delegate and still be involved. Solutions might include kicking off a design session with developers to talk about general approaches, and reviewing progress with the developer on a regular basis to see if things are on track.

As you and the developer build trust with each other, you can be less involved and fully delegate an activity to let you focus on more important tasks.

2. Find Time to Code

The role is called “Tech Lead” for a reason, and it is essential that you find some time to spend in the codebase. Being involved in the code helps you build respect with the rest of the team, but it also helps keep your knowledge up to date and current with constraints, problems and the “shape” of the current codebase.

If you do not spend time with the code, you run the risk of invoking the “Ivory Tower Architect” anti-pattern, leading technical decisions without understanding their real implications for implementation or maintenance. This anti-pattern has numerous side effects including destroying trust with developers, increasing the development time of new features, and increasing the accidental complexity of your software systems.

There are many different ways a Tech Lead can find time to code, but it is essential that you make it a priority. This often means making difficult choices about where you spend your time. Tip #1 should help increase the amount of available time you have. I know some Tech Leads who will block out time in their calendar to ensure that there is always time during the week to write or review code with the other developers. I know of other Tech Leads who review commit logs, and provide feedback to developers – similar to a loose pair-programming style.

3. Visualise Your Architecture

I have worked in several teams where developers had no idea how their task fit into a bigger picture. A small technical decision made by a developer might have a wider architectural impact, but is impossible to prevent if developers do not understand the broader picture.

An effective Tech Lead often has a visual representation of their system architecture on-hand and uses it to have discussions with developers. There will often be different views of the architecture (logical, deployment, etc) and each diagram helps developers see how their task fits into a broader system architecture.

A whole-team whiteboard session is often a useful exercise for reviewing the overall architecture, as it evolves over time to meet differing requirements and the discussion during the session is even more important than the diagram. Focus on key quality attributes that drive out your architectural vision (scalability, performance, usability concerns, etc) and how they have shaped your architecture. Call out assumptions and the historical context to help developers guide their everyday decisions.

4. Spend Time 1-on-1 With Team Members

An effective Tech Lead will not be measured with how many coding tasks they complete. They are measured by how effective their software team is. Anything that a Tech Lead can do to make each person on their team better, makes the overall team better. Sit down with members on your team to understand their backgrounds, their strengths, their interests and their goals to understand how the people in your team fit together as a group. Connect developers with opportunities for them to grow. This means allowing them to take risks so they can learn and grow, but also contribute to the team. Encourage people sharing knowledge across the team and find ways to help each team member connect with each other.

5. Learn to Speak the Language of the Business

To be an effective Tech Lead, you will need a great relationship with people outside of the development team including people like Product Managers, Marketing, Sales and CxOs. They will not understand the vocabulary you accumulated as a developer, and talking to them in terms of frameworks, technical tools and platforms will only confuse them.

An effective Tech Lead finds ways for non-technical people to understand technical concepts, and the best way to do that is to find the terms that business people use and find ways to explain tasks in those terms. Use visual models, whiteboard sessions and metaphors to help business people understand technical concepts and their implications. You might rehearse on friends or relatives who don’t work in technology to see if you can succinctly explain an idea.

Minimize the translation layer as much as possible by bringing business terms into the development team and encouraging their use as much as possible. The better the developer team uses these domain terms, the better their understanding and empathy with business stakeholders will be.

This is a repost of an old blog post I published while I worked at ThoughtWorks and wanted to recapture it here. See the original here.

Just Published: Building Evolutionary Architectures

October 9, 2017 / / 3 Comments

I’m very proud to announce the release of a new book that I co-authored with Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons whilst I was at ThoughtWorks. Martin Fowler writes the Foreword (snippet below):

While I’m sure we have much to learn about doing software architecture in an evolutionary style, this book marks an essential road map on the current state of understanding

Building Evolutionary Architectures

It marks the end of a very long project that I hope will have a positive impact on the way that developers and architects consider building and designing software. We will also post related news to our accompanying website evolutionaryarchitecture.com

You can find the book available on:

Enjoy!

Feedback Booklet

The Gift of Feedback (in a Booklet)

March 19, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Receiving timely relevant feedback is an important element of how people grow. Sports coaches do not wait until the new year starts to start giving feedback to sportspeople, so why should people working in organisations wait until their annual review to receive feedback? Leaders are responsible for creating the right atmosphere for feedback, and to ensure that individuals receive useful feedback that helps them amplify their effectiveness.

I have given many talks on the topic and written a number of articles on this topic to help you.

However today, I want to share some brilliant work from some colleagues of mine, Karen Willis and Sara Michelazzo (@saramichelazzo) who have put together a printable guide to help people collect feedback and to help structure witting effective feedback for others.

Feedback Booklet

The booklet is intended to be printed in an A4 format, and I personally love the hand-drawn style. You can download the current version of the booklet here. Use this booklet to collect effective feedback more often, and share this booklet to help others benefit too.

Reflecting on the Tech Lead Skills for Developers Course in Brazil

February 26, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Earlier this month, I visited our Brazilian offices to run some internal training, called Tech Lead Skills for Developers. The trip felt a bit full circle as I had visited Brazil several years ago for the same reason and needed to develop the material. Instead of the handful of people I coached, I ran two full classes with a mix of people currently playing the Tech Lead role and those who might be stepping into the role.

The course I run uses a mix of training styles (short presentations, lots of time for story sharing, discussions, interactive exercises, brainstorm and lots of time for question time). In general I’m really happy with the overall result with a good balance of covering lots of material, making it personalised and relevant, and giving people an opportunity to practice, gather feedback and have a go at applying it. The feedback for the course was quite consistent with those in the past, telling me that the balance was just about right.

One of the great opportunities I have had, running this course in different places is seeing some of the cultural implications and differences between continents. I learned, for example, that Brazil (traditionally) has a higher Power Distance Index (PDI on the Hofstede Dimensions), which means that, at least compared to the United Kingdom or America, authority is viewed a bit more strictly. In practice, this meant that a lot of the developers, working in more collaborative environments seemed to almost take an extreme anti-leadership position, where any mark of authority was viewed poorly, or that there was a reluctance to be seen taking on a title.

I also discovered that the word delegate in Portuguese had a negative association. As we discussed how effective leaders scale themselves through effective delegation, it was almost interpreted as a manager telling people to take care of the bad tasks – which, of course, wasn’t the intent! In the end, I tried to express effective delegation as a way of ensuring that all important responsibilities were being taken care of.

I am running this course again later this year in both Thailand and Singapore and look forward to seeing some more of the cultural differences that emerge during the discussions.

The Well Rounded Architect

The Well Rounded Architect

November 27, 2016 / / 6 Comments

In this blog post, I explore the six different dimensions I covered in my recent talk at the O’Reilly Software Architecture conference in London called “The Well Rounded Architect.”

The elements of the well-rounded architect

The Well Rounded Architect

Acting as a Leader

Good software architects understand that their role as a leader is not necessarily telling developers what to do. Rather, good architects act like a guide, shepherding a team of developers towards the same technical vision drawing upon leadership skills such as story-telling, influencing, navigating conflict and building trust with individuals to turn their architectural vision into reality.

A good leader, and thus, a good architect, will listen carefully to the opinions of each contributor, fine-tuning their vision with feedback from the team. This leads well onto the next point.

Being a developer

Making good architectural choices is a function of balancing an ideal target architectural state with the current state of a software system. As an example, there is no sense in adding a document database to a system if the problem domain is better suited for a relational database, even if that’s boring. An architect may feel tempted to impose technologies or architectural choices without considering the fit for the problem space – AKA behaviours of the “ivory tower architect.”

The best way an architect can mitigate this is by spending time with developers and time in the code. Understanding how the system has been built up, and the constraints of the system as it stands today will give the architect more information about the right choices for today’s environment.

Having a systems focus

Seasoned developers know that code is only one aspect to working software. To make code run, a seasoned developer understands there are other important quality attributes necessary for code to run well in its production environment. They consider aspects like deployment processes, automated testing, performance, security, and supportability. Where developers may approach these quality attributes ad hoc, an architect will focus on understanding not just the code but also the quality attributes necessary to meet the many needs of different stakeholders such as support, security, and operations staff.

The good architect focuses on finding solutions that can satisfy as many of these different stakeholder needs instead of choosing a tool or approach optimised for the preferences or style of a single contributor.

Thinking like an entrepreneur

All technology choices have costs and benefits, and a good architect will consider new technology choices from both perspectives. Successful entrepreneurs are willing to take risks, but seek ways to learn quickly and fail fast. Architects can approach technology choices in a similar way, seeking real-world information about short- and long-term costs and the likely benefits they will realise.

A good example is when the architect avoids committing to a new tool based on reading a new article, or having heard about it at a conference. Instead they seek to understand how relevant the tool is in their environment by running an architectural spike to gather more information. They don’t pick a tool based on how good the sales pitch is, but what value it offers, given what they need for their system. They also look for the hidden costs of tools such as how well is a tool supported (e.g. level of documentation, community adoption), how much lock-in the tool brings or the extra risks it introduces over the long-term.

Balancing strategic with tactical thinking

A lot of teams build their software reactively with individual developers choosing tools and technologies that they are most comfortable with, or have the most experience with.

The good architect keeps an eye out for what newer technologies, tools or approaches might be useful but does not necessarily draw upon them immediately. Technology adoption requires a considered approach looking at a long-term horizon. Architects will seek for a good balance between agility (allowing the team to move fast) and alignment (keeping enough consistency) at both a team and organisational level.

An exercise like the Build your own Tech Radar is a useful tool to explore technologies with strategy in mind.

Communicating well

Architects know that effective communication is a key skill for building trust and influencing people outside of the team. They know that different groups of people use different vocabulary and that using the technical terms and descriptions with business people makes communication more difficult. Instead of talking about patterns, tools and programming concepts, the architect uses words their audience will be familiar with. Communicating technical choices to business people with words like risk, return, costs, and benefits will serve an architect better than the words they use with their development team.

An architect also realises that communicating within the team is just as important as outside, and will use diagrams and group discussions to establish and refine the technical vision, and use a written log like an Architectural Decision Log or a wiki to provide a historical trail for future generations.

Conclusion

Doing the job of a well-rounded architect is not easy. There are so many elements to focus us, each drawing upon many skills that a developer often doesn’t focus on practicing. What is most important is not necessarily the ability an architect has, but that they have enough expertise in each of these different areas to be effective. An architect who is skillful in only one of these six areas described above will not be as effective as an architect who has a good level of expertise in all of them.

We can do better

October 26, 2016 / / 1 Comment

I’m proud that many people are actively addresing diversity issues. Research shows that diversity leads to better problem solving and often, more creative solutions. Unfortunately the results of history lead us to where we are today, but we can always do better. I’m proud to be part of ThoughtWorks, where we are also trying to do our part to address diversity issues, and our work was recently recognised as a great company for Women in Tech. And yes, I do realise that diversity goes beyond just gender diversity.

As a fairly regular conference speaker this year, I have been disappointed by some of the actions of both conference organisers and speakers that have been, in my opinion, rather unhelpful.

At a conference speaker’s dinner earlier in the year, the topic of diversity came up where someone calculated that only 4 out of almost 60 speakers were women. I was truly disappointed when one of the conference organisers responded with, “That’s just the industry ratio isn’t it? It’s just too hard to find women speakers.” Of course not all conference organisers have this attitude, such as The Lead Dev conference which ended up with 50% women:men speaker ratio or like Flowcon which achieved a >40% ratio women:men as well. Jez Humble writes about his experiences achieving this goal (recommended reading for conference organisers).

At another conference, I saw a slide tweeted from a talk that looked like this below (Note: I’ve found the original and applied my own label to the slide)

Bad slide of stereotypes

My first thoughts went something like: “Why do all the developers look like men and why do all the testers look like women?” I was glad to see some other tweets mention this, which I’m hoping that the speaker saw.

We all have responsibilities when we speak

I believe that if you hold talks at a conference, you have a responsibility to stop reinforcing stereotypes, and start doing something, even if it’s a little thing like removing gendered stereotypes. Be aware of the imagery that you use, and avoid words that might reinforce minority groups feeling even more like a minority in tech. If you don’t know where to start, think about taking some training about what the key issues are.

What you can do if you’re a speaker

As a speaker you can:

  • Review your slides for stereotypes and see if you can use alternative imagery to get your message across.
  • Find someone who can give you feedback on words you say (I am still trying to train myself out of using the “guys” word when I mean people and everyone).
  • Give your time (mentoring, advice and encouragement) to people who stand out as different so they can act like role models in the future.
  • Give feedback to conferences and other speakers when you see something that’s inappropriate. More likely than not, people are more unaware of what other message people might see/hear, and a good presenter will care about getting their real message across more effectively.

What to do if you’re a conference organiser

I’ve seen many great practices that conferences use to support diversity. These include:

One thing that I have yet to experience, but would like as a speaker is a review service where I could send some version of slides/notes (there is always tweaking) and get some feedback about whether the imagery/words or message I intend to use might make the minorities feel even more like a minority.

Panel for Tech Leads: “Navigating Difficult Situations”

August 1, 2016 / / 0 Comments

I recently moderated a panel in our London ThoughtWorks office aimed at developers leading technnical teams as a follow up from the Lead Developer conference.

Leading development teams can be a challenging prospect. Balancing the needs of the business with those of your team requires a number of different skills and these situations are often very difficult to prepare for.

This panel session will provide a platform for a group of tech leads to come together and share their experiences, insights and advice around the topic of managing conflict and overcoming difficult moments within your teams.

Our panelists are all at various stages of their own leadership journeys and will be offering a range of perspectives and viewpoints to help you on your way.

Tech Lead Panellists

The panelists shared their experiences around situations like:

  • Having a tough conversation with a team member or customer;
  • Sharing how they have dealt with overtime (weekends, later work);
  • How they resolved a technical disagreement within a team; and
  • Handling a particularly aggressive person, or being aggressively threatened;

The audience also threw in a few questions like:

  • Dealing with office politics;
  • Finding access to key influencers/stakeholders;
  • Where you draw the line with a person on a team; and
  • Dealing with a technical stakeholder who is too involved, because they seem to have too much time;

We also had some great sound bites in relation to the topics being discussed.

To deal with angry people:

Be the adult – Laura Paterson

or just:

Let them vent – Jon Barber

Managing stakeholders is hard, and you sometimes need to take a stance:

It’s easy to say no – Priya Samuel

People in teams need feedback to both strengthen confidence and improve effectiveness. However:

Frank feedback is really hard. Give the person a chance. – Mike Gardiner

Lastly when thinking about people and teams:

Have empathy. Pairing is scary & exhausting – Kornelis (Korny) Sietsma

I’d like to thank Amy Lynch for organising the panel, Laura Jenkins and Adriana Katrandzhieva for helping with the logistics, all the panelists who contributed their experiences and shared their stories (Priya Samuel, Kornelis (Korny) Sietsma, Mike Gardiner, Laura Paterson and Jon Barber) and all the people who turned up for the evening.

Types of Development Teams

December 17, 2015 / / 2 Comments

In some of the Tech Lead courses I have held, we sometimes talk about leadership styles and whether or not the Tech Lead role is essential. During these discussions, one of the biggest influences on both style and necessity is the style of teams.

This article represents my current classification of teams I have seen over my years in industry.

One man army

A lonely developer working on a project by themselves. Most likely they are working on multiple projects and consequently multi-tasking, because that’s the way the organisation works. Often seen in organisations that are siloed. Technically not a team but treated as a part of a team.

Distributed

Distributed teams come in many shapes and sizes. Although distributed teams are similar to Off-Shore teams (see below), distributed teams tend to be a team spanning several locations. GitHub are an example of a distributed team (and organisation). Often seen with start-ups who are seeking talent not easily found in the same location.

A distributed team typically spans several timezone, making an “all-hands” meeting more difficult. Relies on asynchronous tooling such as chat software (e.g. IRC, Slack) and virtual task boards.

Off-Shore

An Off-Shore team is a distributed team in mainly two locations. Often used by many IT organisations as a “cost-cutting” tactic trading communication effectiveness. Sometimes an off-shore team is a historical artifact (company acquisition or expansion) and necessary to keep essential knowledge alive.

Off-shore teams often have better overlap with time zones that fully distributed teams, but often results in an us-and-them mentality.

The “Pod” shaped team

The “Pod” shaped team is a co-located team who that has most of the skills they need to deliver a project. The team often includes a PM, developers, analysts, testers and sometimes operation and support people. They are all working towards the same project at the same time. This reduces co-ordination and communication lag and makes software delivery more effective.

They are called a “pod” because they are kept to a certain size (typically less than 12 people) to keep communication overhead minimised.

Functional Silos

Functional silos are not representative of effective teams because people are grouped managerially and physically by skillset instead of by goal. Each group is managed by a separate person and in larger company, decision making and authority reaches several layers much higher into the organisational hierarchy. Collaborating and changing the way that a team working on the same project across functional silos becomes very difficult to change.

Typical functional silos often seen: PM (and their PMO), Analysis, Developers, QA, DBA, System Administrators, Network and Support.

Holding a Tech Lead course in Sydney

August 31, 2015 / / 1 Comment

With a one-time only opportunity this year, I am running a course for Architects and Tech Leads on 22-23 October at the ThoughtWorks Sydney offices. After interviewing over 35 Tech Leads for the Talking with Tech Leads book, I recognised there is a gap about teaching developers the special leadership skills a successful Architect and Tech Lead demands. The class size is really limited, so reserve yourself a place while you can.

Tech Lead

In this very hands-on and discussion-based course, participants will cover a wide breadth of topics including understanding what a Tech Lead is responsible for, the technical aspects a developers rarely experiences and is not accountable for, and the difficult people-oriented side to the role including influencing, relationship building and tools for better understanding your team.

This is a two-day course that will quickly pay back dividends in accelerating you on your path or further developing your Tech Lead skills as developers. Register here on eventbrite for the course 22-23 October.

Roles, not People

June 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Naming functions and methods are one of the hardest tasks developers need to take. A good name is hard to find, but with enough thought, is useful to show intent.

Likewise, the name for a given role is useful to help establish what that role is accountable for, and can help speed up communication when people have a common understanding of that role.

All models are wrong, but some are useful – George E.P. Box

Unfortunately there are two inherent problems with role titles:

  • People do not understand the role
  • Roles are not the same as people

Issue 1: People do not understand the role

One point of confusion is assumptions about what the role does or does not do. For example, a Project Manager might assume that the QA role will be responsible for a Testing Strategy. In another situation, a different Project Manager might assume the Tech Lead will be responsible for a Testing Strategy. In this case, different expectations could be a source of conflict about which role is responsible for the Testing Strategy.

Another example might be where the Tech Lead assumes the QA role is responsible for the Testing Strategy, and the QA role assumes the Tech Lead is responsible – resulting in no one really thinking about a Testing Strategy.

A great way mechanism to force a way forward is to run a “Roles & Responsibilities” session. I find an effective method to run one is:

  • As an entire team, brainstorm all the important activities that must be completed by the entire group. Ensure that one activity is written on a separate sticky note.
  • Brainstorm some names of roles and put them at the top of a whiteboard/flipchart next to each other. You may want to add a generic “Everyone” or “Team Member” role as well.
  • Ask everyone to place each activity under the roles they think should be responsible for the activity.
  • Walking the board, review each role one at a time and their activities, inviting discussion and disagreement about why the role should be/not be responsible for that particular activity.

This is a very useful exercise for helping to define, and articulate confusion around particular goals.

Issue 2: Roles are not the same as people

Another common failure mode of roles is where people assume that a role is the same as the person. On my business card, I have the title: Generalising Specialist because it’s true – although I consider myself a developer, architect or Principal Consultant, I am also much more than that.

Generalising Specialiast

Generalising Specialiast

People come with a whole bag of skills and experiences that sometimes fit into a particular role. Just as important as it is to understand a person’s strengths – it’s just as important to understand where their fit for a role is and the gaps. A person may be much more capable of playing several roles at once, or a role can be split among a group of people with the right set of skills and experiences.

Concluding thoughts

Remember that roles are a name we give to a collection of responsibilities and it doesn’t necessarily map to single people. A role may be split among people (where the responsibilities are distributed) but it is essential that everyone has the same understanding of who has those responsibilities.

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