How should Leaders are spend their Day?

A Day With Leader.

The leader 's responsibilities are not too different from any other developer on the team. In fact, if you’ve been working as a software developer for a few years, chances are you’ve filled the role of tech lead/ team leader at some point. Perhaps not officially, but most of us have, at anytime, called the shots on important pieces of work or been the go-to person on a particular project.

Most ‘true’ leaders are “de facto” tech leads- leaders in all senses of the word, but without the fancy title. In teams that contain few people who satisfied different meanings of the tech lead/team lead role, with one who excelling at organization and big vision, another at right execution and day-to-day engineering, and another at better architecture, teaching, or getting stuff deployed smoothly.

What does day look like?

With wearing a leader’s crown, This is good for the team, but it adds challenges to scheduling time due to much of day is interrupt-driven with complex activity. On a light day, leader spend maybe a couple of hours doing Tech lead/Team lead work. But on a heavy day, he/she get about couple hour of time that’s not waste by interruptions or switch to another activity/task. This can make it difficult to estimate what day he/she will finish task/activity.

Do below things in roughly as follows :
1. Do any pending code reviews OR optimize the code solutions.
2. Make sure everybody on the team has enough work for the rest of the week/day(s).
3. Project work and coding.
4. Check the status of builds(QA/UAT/Prod. etc..) and the health of release pipelines.
5. Answer any doubts/problems (or equivalent) pings of team mates.
6. Help anybody who needs it in team either technically or non-technically.

At least Once a day:
1. Check all test cases/experiments if there is any. For new Test cases/experiments, look for possible errors and performance problems (or unexpected gains, which are more likely to be bugs), etc.
2. Check production monitoring/analysis, performance graphs. Investigate major regressions to things it looks like we might have affected.

At least Once a week:
1. Look through the all bug backlog, make sure a major bug isn’t slipping or move to pending through the cracks or No clarification or Pending Solutions of team mate's problems/doubts.
2. Visit pending task/bug list, and prioritise them in the backlog and provide list to team.

"Admittedly I am not so good with time management. It is so tempting and easy to over commit myself. Even In present, I am still learning to master my time management!!"

What’s the most challenging part?

In case of tech. lead, The nature of tech lead- being both “technical” and “leader”. it means you need to be constantly learning, and it is never-ending! Often it's lead to out of comfort zone, but you have to find yourself needing to be on your toes to meet the challenges that arise.

In tech. lead role, you are one of the most experienced developer, you should be able to guide juniors or least experience developer, to suggest the best possible path. At times I heve least knowledge about the programming language being used myself. But as my experience and logical reasoning mean that I learn quickly. However, being a quick and strong learner is not enough. More importantly, you have to be a good teacher. A good tech lead is a good teacher. I should multiply the knowledge in my team by teaching my colleagues/teammates. Teaching others makes you better at your own job and makes you more prepared to answer/solution of technical questions/problems.

What’s the favourite part of leader role?

My favourite part of being a tech lead is that I get to chance to play around with ideas for success.
These are the key learnings:
● Plan work for at least one month ahead if possible(knowing that 90% of the time it will change). Code attachment is horrible thing. just stay away!!
● Accept that every day will pose a new challenge
● Review code periodically.
● Don't wait for the perfect team, build one.
● Take ownership and get stuff/task done.
● Encourage the team to learn and implement new technologies.
● Be comfortable with making decisions with limited knowledge and resources.
● Use free startup tools to increase productivity.
● Have mentors and thank them.
● Learn from our mistakes and celebrate our success.
● Design the system for continuous delivery
● Don't plan for scalability in advance, but don't delay till the system breaks.
● Optimize/update system periodically. Legacy Code not good for long plan.

What makes a good Leader?

A leader helps the team as a whole, but also individual members of the team to become amazing. A good leader understands individual’s goals and helps them to achieve their goals by:
● Knowing when to step back and allow the team to take more ownership
● Sharing responsibility, giving ownership … but staying accountable
● Knowing when to give input
● Knowing when to make decisions

A good tech lead is a steady and guiding communicator. Part of the Tech Lead’s responsibility is communicating to the team the aims and approaches of the project plan. A Tech Lead makes sure everyone knows what to do in team, how to do it, and has the tools to be able to do it to ensure expectations are met.

How do you balance coding/non-coding responsibilities?

As a tech. lead, The first priority is the team’s holistic productivity. And you just need to fight the guilt that comes with this. It's incredibly tempting to say "oh, I think I have enough time, so I can take that Task/activity". Your job isn’t to crank out the most code. Your job is to make the people on team successful. If something important needs to be done, and You don’t have time to do it, it will delegate it. This will help the whole team move forward.

Having said that, it is very important not to neglect the hands-on technical activities, such as write/maintain code, define interfaces, complete code reviews periodically and keep an eye on the evolution of the code, etc.. BA in your team helped you work out a system that worked well. you only took those tasks that were either small, non-blocking, or didn’t have a deadline. So you get to have you hands dirty when you find the time!