The role of team leader: what remains for managers?

Hello, Habr!

Recently, in the field of IT and digital, the word “timlid” is increasingly heard. But a detailed examination shows that everyone understands this profession in their own way.

Someone says that the team leader should lead the entire project, and managers only interfere. Others believe that only the manager should communicate with the client. The administrative question also remains open: in whose subordination do developers and testers work?

In this article we will try to figure out who this mysterious team lead is and do we really need managers?



Who is team lead?

TeamLead, as the word implies, is the leader of the development team. This is the person who is responsible for everything related to development in the project. It has a very rich functionality - it is withdrawing a client’s request, evaluating the volume and terms of work taking into account the risks and characteristics of his team, distributing tasks within the team with maximum efficiency, planning and issuing releases, and even motivating the team to work and participate in presentations of key releases to the customer .

The importance of such a person in a team is difficult to overestimate, because the manager, as a rule, is not a technical specialist, so he may have difficulties both at the stage of task assessment and at the stage of organizing the development and presentation of releases.

Does team lead write code? Of course, because he inspires his team including a personal example. But he spends no more than 20-30% of his working time writing code, since his priority is team management.

Professional portrait The

competencies necessary for a person applying for such a position in the project can be divided into two groups: technical and managerial. Let's consider them separately.

Technical competencies
Timlid should, first of all, be able to transform a business task into a technical task, understandable for developers. It is not as simple as it seems, because business tasks are sometimes formulated very, very extensively. Moreover, he needs to be able to explain to developers not only what needs to be done, but also why it is needed.

The leader of the development team must certainly have an understanding of the industrial development process in terms of sharing responsibility within the team, the process of managing requirements, quality and the technologies necessary to service the process.

As mentioned above, the team leader himself writes the code, therefore, no doubt, he must have solid development experience - from 5 years or more.

Managerial competencies
Almost all standard managerial competencies can be attributed to this group, but the most important ones are worth highlighting. For example, delegation. Many team leaders sin by writing all the code themselves. Thus, on the one hand, they do not allow people to make mistakes, learn from their mistakes and develop. On the other hand, they fail their managerial tasks.

The next important competency is team motivation. Those specialists who learn to do it right will get a huge advantage over the rest. A person working with his team side by side is much easier to motivate people than the formal boss.

Finally, team lead is a mentor for members of his team. Therefore, he needs to be able to properly develop people - to distribute interesting and complex tasks, correctly
give developing feedback, draw up development plans.

Of course, this is not a complete list of the skills needed by the timlid. Do not forget about universal personal qualities, which are just as important as professional competencies. It should be said about them separately.

Let's start with responsibility. The ability to take responsibility for their actions and results, unfortunately, is not so common today. The reasons for this are not completely clear. Most likely, the roots of this problem go deep into the education system, which most likely forms the ability to shift responsibility to circumstances and other people.

The ability to correctly express thoughts in writing and orally. Timlid, of course, should not be a professional speaker and writer, but to have basic writing and verbal skills in his thoughts is simply vital. Imagine a team leader who writes with spelling and grammar errors and is unable to communicate two words in communication with the customer.

And finally, the most important quality for any profession is honesty. Ability to be honest in the first place to oneself, the ability not to turn a blind eye to moments when something goes wrong. Honesty before team members, project managers and the customer. Just think how many unsuccessful projects would be saved if someone got up on time and said, "We have a problem."

The role of the manager

Even if the team has a very strong team lead, the manager will still have a number of tasks. This is the administrative work of maintaining contracts and other documents, and budget planning and deadlines. In the absence of an account director, the manager assumes his responsibilities and is engaged in maintaining and developing relationships with the client.

Finally, the manager can be a real producer of the project, managing the product from several sides at once: design, development, marketing, etc. However, this is a very difficult role and the manager needs to grow up to it in both professional and personal sense.

Summary

The more complex the project, the more important the role of the team lead in it, because the manager simply cannot possess all the competencies - especially the technical ones - to the same extent as a professional developer. At the same time, even a very strong programming professional may not have good managerial skills to manage development. That is why team lead becomes an indispensable link in the team of any project.

The question remains, how do developers become team leaders? We will talk about this and about a career in IT in general in our next articles.