400 Tech Leads. Same Problems. None of Them Technical

Hello, welcome, everyone. So for the next 20 minutes, I'm going to share with you the main challenges that tech leads keep bringing in training and coaching sessions. But first, I'm going to start with a quick intro. So I'm Henri Fischer. I've been in tech for more than 12 years now. I started as a software engineer and then jumped into different leadership roles like tech lead, engineering manager. But my main focus for the past five years has been training and coaching tech leads in building high-performing teams. And that's why I want to start with the definition of the tech lead role.

The tech lead is a software engineer responsible for leading a development team and accountable for the technical deliverables of that team. The reason why it's important to emphasize this definition is because depending on who you're asking, you might get different answers on what a tech lead is. I'm always surprised by how even asking people in the same company, I get completely different answers and expectations on what the tech lead should do. This is what I'm going to be referring to when I talk about the tech lead during this presentation. Going into details, things get a little bit fuzzy, but at a high level, everyone agrees on this definition.

This confusion around the role often puts pressure on people because they are not clear on who they should listen to or what they should be focusing on, leading to the first challenge in the role, which is time management. This challenge manifests in various forms, usually as 'I have no time for coding,' 'I have no time for planning,' or as in a specific case I encountered when a client mentioned having no time for strategic work. To address this challenge, we analyzed the tasks she was handling, realizing the need to delegate responsibilities and share tasks with the team to alleviate the time pressure. By focusing on strategies to shift from a driver role to a support role, we aimed to improve time management and task allocation for better efficiency.

In this case, I have this particular case coach, a client that came to me in coaching and said she said I have no time for strategic work. The stakeholders are giving me feedback that I should put more time into planning ahead. And so to address this, we started looking at all the things that she was currently doing. And at the first view, things started to look very straightforward, like managing stakeholders, managing cross team initiatives, planning the work. But then things got a little bit more confusing when I saw things like she was driving all the one ones, estimating all the work, assigning all the tasks individually, having the responsibility for people's growth, building their growth plans and running all the showcases on onboarding.

So I asked her, OK, what from these tasks can you share with your team? What responsibilities maybe you can give away or share with your team? And she came up with a number of them. The yellow ones are the ones that she felt more comfortable starting with. And then I asked, OK, but if you'd have to meet to choose one, where where exactly would you would you start? And she chose the one one. So she was struggling a lot preparing the one on ones. It was a lot of pressure, always being worried that they're not going to have what to talk about. She was reviewing notes. She was reviewing their tasks, their work, putting a lot of effort just to making sure that the one on ones she's driving them properly.

And so we started working on a strategy that took her from the driver seat in the one on ones into the into the support role. And that meant shifting the one on one agenda ownership to her team members. So in order to do that, the first thing she did is going back to our team and setting the new expectation that, look, I'm not going to be bringing topics anymore. So you're going to have to be the one bringing topics. I'm going to show up, answer any questions you might have and support you in your in your process, but you're going to have to be the one that drives this conversation. Of course, this work for some people, some brought topics, but some didn't.

And so we had the strategy in place for this. And for the ones that didn't bring any topics, we agreed that she's going to use those one on ones to discuss exactly about the elephant in the room and why they are no topics. So once she got into it, one of the most common replies she would get is that, well, we don't know exactly what to talk about. This was kind of the common struggle. And so she said, OK, I want to give them some ideas in regards to what they can talk about. And in order to share these ideas, we looked at the people that did bring topics like what did they talk about? What were they interested in bringing to the one on ones? And what came up was mostly topics around growth. How can I get to the next level? How can I develop that particular skill? And so we identified this as being the main interest for people. And she brought that back to the team members that didn't have anything to talk about. And step by step, she managed to pass over also the ownership of growth and help people develop their growth plans and have complete ownership and identify opportunities instead of her being the one doing that. So she went into a supporting role instead of a driver role for their growth and for the one on ones.

By this time, our coaching relationship ended, but she already had more time in her calendar, less pressure. And she started thinking about she started thinking ahead about the work that was coming and putting more effort into that. But the key part is that she got the main learning out of it. And that is that as a tech lead, you are accountable for making sure this all things happen. But the whole team is responsible to make sure to make sure the work is done. So learn how to rely on your team and bring them into the process. It's going to benefit you and is definitely going to benefit them also.

The second struggle that tech leads keep bringing in discussions is giving constructive feedback. This issue arises from various reasons, such as having no feedback or lacking the knowledge of how to provide it. To address these challenges, strategies involve tracking conversations, examining team tasks, and utilizing frameworks like SBI for structured feedback delivery. However, the primary obstacle often stems from the fear of negative reactions to feedback. By exploring potential scenarios together and challenging these apprehensions, individuals can realize the exaggeration of their concerns and develop strategies for control. Encouraging discussions with mentors, coaches, or even self-reflection can significantly alleviate this pressure.

The third challenge faced by tech leads revolves around delegation. Many struggle with delegation due to past experiences where expectations were not met. Proper delegation entails setting clear outcome expectations and agreeing on timelines to avoid misunderstandings. A common pitfall is assuming common knowledge and neglecting to communicate crucial details to team members. By establishing transparent objectives, deadlines, and fostering open communication, tech leads can enhance delegation effectiveness and ensure successful task completion.

And what I've noticed is that this process of exploration and really pushing them and challenging them to go through their thoughts and what they imagine might happen, it's very beneficial to reduce the pressure because most of the time they realize that what they imagine is very unrealistic. There's a very small probability that those scenarios actually might happen or if something happens, they come up with strategies and solutions that puts them in control in that conversation. So the learning here is that very often our brains tend to make the problems way bigger than they are. So if you are struggling with this, I definitely encourage you to talk over to someone, with someone that can challenge you on and ask you some challenging questions through coaching, through mentoring, but also maybe just writing it down on a piece of paper and do a brain dump of everything that that you are thinking about can greatly help you remove that pressure.

The third challenge that tech leads keep bringing is around delegation. So this particular client, she came to me and she told me, I want to delegate more. I know I have to. But the last time I delegated, it didn't turn out the way I expected. So I gave this task to the senior engineer in my team. And they missed a very important edge case, which was obvious that they needed to take care of. And so I ask, OK, so if it was so clear to you, why didn't you tell them in advance that they need to take care of this? And she said, well, because it was common sense. They were a senior engineer and obviously they should know about it. Well, the problem with common sense is that is not that common. And depending on who you're asking, what the definition of done is and how good looks like, you might get different answers.

So leaving this assumption aside and going back to the challenges and her being worried that the outcome might be different or that the quality might drop if she doesn't do it herself or she will lose complete control over what's happening with that task. There is a main strategy that help her and it's the key to proper delegation, which is setting clear expectations on the outcome. How, what exactly do I expect to happen? What deliverable should be done at the end of this process? And maybe even any thoughts that you have about how would you look at it and how would you how it would look like if you would do it? Second, agreeing on the timeline. So I know deadlines are I've seen a lot of teams avoiding to talk about deadlines. It's like it's a big pressure. We don't want to pressure people. But the reality is, there is always a deadline. The only difference is if you talk about it or not, if it's explicit or unclear and hidden, there is always a deadline and just making it clear helps everyone get a line and get on the same on the same page.

So agreeing if when there's this needs to be delivered and if there's any milestones in the meantime, it's key. And third, and the most important one is agreeing on the process. And this is the one that people most miss on and the one that makes the biggest difference. So when we're thinking about that fear of losing control. People are usually thinking, oh, I'm going to give this task away and they're going to come back to me in four weeks and it's not going to look the way I was expecting. And I will have nothing to say because it will be too late. So by agreeing a process on the process, on how we're going to work together, you can create a strategy that would help you stay in control with this particular client. She she agreed with the person she was delegating to that they are going to meet every week and they're going to discuss about the progress and they're going to discuss about potential risks. This gave her the chance to basically ask questions, but also intervene if she felt like things are going off track or there is a problem. So this put her back in the in the control mode and she felt way more comfortable starting in this process. And step by step, she gained confidence and things became way easier. But the main learning that I want you to take out of this story is that most problems in tech teams come from assuming everyone is on the same page when they actually aren't.

The fourth challenge comes from the startup that I worked with. So they had this in a cross-teams initiative that went really bad and I was brought into troubleshoot with them exactly what happened. Why did it went so wrong? So I got in a room with the three tech leads and we started discussing about it. And the first question that I asked them actually showed me the main problem for this for this project going so off track. And the question was, who owns this initiative? So the first tech lead told me the PM. The second tech lead told me the EM. The third tech lead was like, I think the CEO, but it wasn't really sure. So the problem is that by not having a clear owner, there was no shared timeline, no enforced expectations whatsoever. It was just like different pressure coming from different people at different times. Each team has their own planning and were defining their own expectation. There was real coordination on the big picture. So when they tried to integrate, everything blew up. So the main learning that I want you to take out of this is that there's needs to always be an owner. If you're thinking if you're in a project and you cannot answer the question, who owned this, then there's a big chance that things are going to go go off track. So make sure whatever is happening in your team, you always have an owner attached. Keep in mind that the owner doesn't mean that needs to be the one that needs to needs to do the work.

So make sure whatever is happening in your team, you always have an owner attached. Keep in mind that the owner doesn't mean that needs to be the one that needs to needs to do the work. It's just the one overseeing that the work gets done, working together with all the other people involved.

So these are the main challenges that keep coming up when it comes to tech leads. Even in the AI area, what might seem like new problems like how do I find time to keep up with AI and how do I find time to keep learning goes back to not having proper delegation skills or struggling with time management or a lack of clear priority and how to basically understand how you can bring this into your priorities list and focus on it.

Or when the CEO opens at the PR in the middle of the night, it also goes back to struggling to give feedback to the CEO on the PR or on the process and which leads us to the back to the second challenge, which obviously there is a lack of alignment on how are we managing these PRs and what the process would be and what do we do if someone that doesn't have as much technical knowledge basically opens this PR.