Team Lead and Tech Lead: Key Functional Roles
Team Lead and Tech Lead are NOT positions, but key functional roles in a team that experienced professionals can assume.
A Team Lead is responsible for organizing the team’s work, maintaining a productive environment, and assisting colleagues in achieving common goals. In contrast, the Tech Lead focuses on the technical direction, making architectural decisions, and ensuring the project’s quality.
In smaller companies, it’s common to merge both roles under the title of Team Lead. This combined role allows smaller teams to function with greater flexibility and efficiency, facilitating faster decision-making and closer alignment between technical objectives and team processes.
These roles require not only professional skills but also the ability to guide, inspire, and support the team. In this article, I will share the essential skills, tools, and challenges faced by Team and Tech Leads, as well as discuss how to tackle difficulties and succeed in these roles.
🔬 Skills
After analyzing dozens of job postings, I have identified the key skills necessary for our roles.
Team Lead
The Team Lead role is more focused on team management, work organization, and communication.
- Team Management: The Team Lead is responsible for coordinating the team’s work, planning tasks, and ensuring effective operation. A leader must be able to establish processes that support the team’s productivity and motivation.
- Communication Skills: One of the most important skills is the ability to express thoughts clearly and concisely, provide constructive feedback, and effectively communicate information between team members and management.
- Conflict Resolution: The team may encounter disagreements or internal conflicts, and the Team Lead’s role is to ensure their resolution while maintaining a healthy work atmosphere.
- Process Organization: The Team Lead should be capable of implementing and maintaining work processes, such as Agile or Scrum, managing tasks, and ensuring that deadlines are met while the team progresses toward its goals.
- Motivation and Support: It is crucial for a leader to inspire their team to achieve goals, maintain morale, and create conditions for the growth and development of each team member.
- Mentorship: A significant part of the Team Lead’s job is the development and training of team members. The leader helps colleagues grow by providing opportunities to enhance their professional skills and sharing their experiences.
- Creating Technical Tasks: Breaking down epics into technical tasks for the team based on project requirements, and translating business goals into technical tasks (sometimes).
- Task Planning and Estimation: The Team Lead coordinates task planning, estimates completion times, and collaborates with other teams to synchronize processes.
- Release and Deployment Process Oversight: The Team Lead ensures that releases go smoothly and coordinates the deployment process, overseeing the final stages of development.
- Code Review: The leader conducts code reviews, monitors quality, and helps improve coding practices within the team.
- Log and Error Monitoring: An important task is tracking logs, identifying errors, and ensuring their prompt resolution.
Tech Lead
The role of a Tech Lead is more focused on the technical aspects of the project, and the skills required for this role are directly related to making technical decisions and system architecture.
- Architectural Design: Responsible for developing the architecture of the application and technological solutions that support high performance, scalability, reliability, security, and meet business requirements.
- Technical Mentorship: Assisting and guiding other developers in the team on technical issues, ensuring adherence to development standards and best practices. Developing team growth plans and implementing them.
- Technology Research: Keeping track of new technologies, tools, and methods that can enhance development performance, scalability, reliability, and security.
- Code Review + Design Review (before writing code): The Tech Lead analyzes and evaluates architectural solutions before the team begins coding. They must be able to identify flaws, improve architecture, and assist the team in optimizing development processes.
- Documentation Skills: It’s essential for a Tech Lead to document architectural decisions, technologies, and processes to facilitate the ongoing support and development of the project.
- Technical Mentorship: The Tech Lead should also be a mentor to the team, helping developers address technical issues, sharing experiences, and fostering their professional growth.
- Managing the Technical Roadmap: The Tech Lead defines the strategy and technical development plan for the project, keeping an eye on long-term goals.
- CI/CD Configuration: The Tech Lead is responsible for configuring continuous integration and delivery, ensuring the automation of build, testing, and deployment processes.
- Identifying and Eliminating Bottlenecks: The Tech Lead analyzes the system for bottlenecks and develops solutions to address them.
- Resolving Technical Challenges: The Tech Lead takes on the most complex technical tasks and helps the team tackle challenges.
- Log and Error Monitoring: A key task is monitoring logs, identifying errors, and ensuring their prompt resolution.
- Integrating Automated Testing: The Tech Lead actively implements automated testing to ensure the project’s quality and stability.
- Focus on Security: Ensuring the security of code and architecture is a top priority for the Tech Lead.
- Git Flow Control: Managing the development process using git flow, ensuring proper use of branches, and implementing best practices for version control.
This list is not exhaustive, but it covers the essentials. It’s also worth noting that these roles can often be combined and performed by a single person.
🔧 Tools
Choosing the right tools is one of the key aspects of successful team and project management. In today’s technological landscape, many platforms and solutions can significantly simplify workflows, increase productivity, and enhance communication within the team.
Development:- IDE: PhpStorm (primary), Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text — powerful editors with extensions for coding.
- Docker Desktop — for managing containers and local development in containers.
- Postman or Insomnia — for testing APIs, especially when integration with other services is needed.
- Git — for version control and repository management.
- k9s — for managing Kubernetes clusters and monitoring.
- Slack or Discord — for quick messaging, organizing team channels, and discussing issues in real-time.
- Zoom or Google Meet — for conducting regular meetings, both internal (with the development team) and external (with the business or stakeholders).
- Confluence or Notion — for documenting processes, and storing reference information, technical specifications, and updates.
- Figma or Miro — for visualization, collaborative brainstorming, and working on design and architecture.
- Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions — for automating build, testing, and deployment processes.
- Docker— for managing containers and scaling applications.
- Kubernetes — for command-line management, simplifying work with clusters.
- Grafana — for monitoring infrastructure, application performance, and business metrics.
- New Relic, Sentry — for tracking errors and incidents, logging, and responding quickly to issues.
- Postman, Insomnia — for testing and debugging APIs, checking integrations, and service stability.
- Selenium, Cypress — for automated testing of the frontend part of applications (not mandatory).
- Planning Poker (e.g., Miro, EasyRetro, or MURAL) — a virtual version of Planning Poker where the team votes on estimates and can organize discussions when estimates vary widely.
- Teamhood — interactive boards and functionality for estimating tasks in points, helping the team customize tasks for specific sprints and manage the process.
- ClickUp — includes features for Agile task estimation using points, time estimates, and tracking team progress.
- EasyRetro — a specialized tool for conducting retrospectives. It includes templates, boards for discussing improvements, and surveys that can be customized for your team.
- Retrium — a platform for retrospectives with tools for creating boards, surveys, and voting, as well as analytics on meetings.
- Jira — for task management and prioritization, where it’s easy to leave comments on tasks to keep everyone updated on changes.
- Monday.com — allows you to create task boards, customize workflows, set timelines, and work with Scrum boards.
- Trello with Power-Ups — simple task management that can be adapted for Scrum boards by adding Power-Ups for task estimation and integration with other tools.
- Asana — can be set up for Scrum boards, adding features for task estimation and sprint breakdowns.
- ClickUp — supports Scrum functionality, allowing for task estimates and adding metrics.
👾 Challenges
Encountering challenges is an inevitable part of being a Tech Lead. Whether it’s technical debt, risk management, or changing requirements, it’s important to remain flexible and ready to adapt to new conditions. Continuous learning, sharing experiences with colleagues, and actively participating in the professional community will not only help you overcome difficulties but also make you a more competent and confident leader.
Technical Challenges
- Scalability: As the project grows, it’s crucial to ensure its ability to handle increased loads and data.
- Performance: To manage large volumes of data, you need to be able to profile code, optimize database queries, and utilize caching.
- Security: Protecting the application from various threats such as SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, and others.
- Technology Selection: Analyzing available solutions in the market.
- Technical Debt: Creating a technical roadmap and executing it without affecting business objectives. The business should not halt its operations.
- Maintaining Code Quality: Ensuring high code quality and adherence to standards can be challenging, especially in fast-paced development environments.
Manager Challenges
- Team Management: Motivating the team, distributing tasks, conducting code reviews, and training new employees.
- Planning and Estimation: Creating development plans, estimating effort, and managing priorities.
- Communication: Effectively interacting with the team, management, and clients. Ensuring effective communication within the team and with other departments can be difficult, especially if the team is distributed or working remotely.
- Decision-Making: Making technical decisions that will impact the entire project.
- Conflict Management: Resolving disagreements among team members.
Business Challenges
- Collaboration with Other Departments: Interacting with designers, testers, product managers, and other project participants.
- Adapting to Changing Requirements: Responding quickly to changes in client requirements.
- Cost Optimization: Finding the optimal balance between quality and cost of development.
Personal Challenges
- Continuous Learning: It is essential to constantly improve your knowledge and skills.
- Stress Resistance: Working under deadlines and high responsibility requires a high level of stress resilience.
- Leadership: The ability to motivate the team and lead them toward achieving common goals.
- Issues with Implementing New Technologies: Introducing new tools or technologies may encounter resistance from the team. The Tech Lead must convince the team of the necessity for changes and demonstrate their benefits.
🎭 Tech/Team Lead — next step of a Senior career?
Many developers feel comfortable reaching the Senior level, myself included. This is quite understandable: deep technical knowledge, independence in decision-making, and a stable income — all of these are attractive. However, for those seeking something new, the role of Tech/Team Lead opens up new horizons.
Why should a Senior Developer consider transitioning to a Tech/Team Lead position?
- Expanded Responsibilities: Instead of deep diving into code, you gain the opportunity to influence the strategic development of the product and the team.
- Development of Soft Skills: Project management, team motivation, and task delegation all require the development of communication and leadership qualities.
- A New Level of Professional Growth: The chance to grow not only as a technical specialist but also as a leader.
- Higher Salary: Generally, Tech/Team Leads receive higher compensation for their knowledge and experience.
However, the transition to a Tech/Team Lead position comes with new challenges:
- Less Time for Coding: Much of your time will be spent on planning, communication, and resolving organizational issues.
- Responsibility for Team Results: The success of the entire project will depend on your decisions.
- Conflict Management: Not all team members will always agree with your decisions, and you will need to know how to resolve conflicts.
Key Questions to Ask Yourself Before Making a Decision:
- Am I ready to delegate tasks and trust others?
- How well do I communicate and motivate people?
- Am I prepared to take responsibility for the team’s results?
- Do I want to develop in the direction of project management?
If you answered these questions positively, then you can confidently move forward and build a career as a Tech/Team Lead!
🏁 Conclusion
Core skills such as communication, conflict resolution, and strategic planning are essential for achieving your goals. The tools you choose can significantly simplify processes and increase the productivity of the team.
However, remember that technology is just a means; the most important thing is your ability to inspire the team and maintain their engagement. Keep in mind that your role is an opportunity to influence the development of the team and the organization as a whole. Be open to change, learn from your mistakes, and always strive for excellence. This is how you can not only overcome challenges but also make a meaningful contribution to the success of your project and company. In conclusion, I would like to wish all Tech Leads success in their challenging yet fascinating work. May each day bring new challenges and opportunities for professional growth. Remember, you are not just executors but architects of the digital future.That’s it 🎉, thanks for reading!