How I became a Developer Team Lead for a month
And all the things I’ve learned from it (as an intermediate developer who just got out of school)
What are your goals with your career?
It’s an oft-asked question during those recurring meetings involving goal setting, pay raises, and other milestones. Within already established companies, there are usually multiple correct answers: from technical routes to creative pivots to managerial promotions.
But as a software developer working for a small though fast-growing company, there seemed just to be one default career direction: The Developer Team Lead.
However, I hesitate to aim for this goal. Do you find this hesitation relatable?
Already a leader in my own way
We’re in a smaller company, so we get to try a bit of everything. Still, some in the team have become the go-to person for certain dev tools, for accessibility, for performance, or for yet other aspects.
Are there any formal incentives for leading these specialties? No. None is needed.
As a big extrovert, I have found myself taking the lead in many of the team-building and culture activities for the company. What can I say? I like playing games during work and puzzling my co-workers here and there.
Hence, it wasn’t that I hesitate to take responsibility in general. I hesitate in the possibility that the duties as a Team Lead might make me less effective in the things I already excel in. Is this a reasonable worry?
A test run or two at becoming Team Lead
Among my coworkers, I just might have the most experience as a Lead despite never officially having been one. After a few such goal-setting meetings, where I soft rejected leadership paths, I was eventually strongly encouraged to take on the role part-time.
I led a team of contractors on extending something in which I had a disproportionate amount of subject matter expertise in. It was on extending a capstone project I worked on as a student. (More info here)
With this stint working out well, my own regular Lead has decided to leave me the keys to the kingdom as he went on vacation for a few weeks. And during these few weeks, our team proudly completed precisely 0 story points.
Sorry Andrew!
So what did I learn from this?
It’s like a new career all over again!
Leadership is a skill rather different from coding (duh). Obvious in hindsight, it took me to be there to realize the asymmetry in skill I had between coding and leading. It’s okay to hold yourself to a higher standard as a Dev, and a l̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ more forgiving standard as a Lead!
Everyone leads differently
Another thing I knew intuitively, but had to be treading in deep water to internalize. Having worked under different team leads and mentors in the past, I’ve experienced teams with different formalities, collaboration strategies, expectations, and even overall effectiveness. You are not your team lead, so do not try to be an exact replacement. Mutually feel out the team dynamic and see where your strengths best fit in!
The team comes first
I feel a level of guilt when it’s noon, and I haven’t opened VSCode even once because I was too occupied doing team lead stuff. But at the end of the day, your individual goals must come secondary to the goals of the team, as a leader (VSCode Live Share is there for you).
Delegate, delegate, delegate! Even if you’re capable of doing it yourself
If you no longer have time to work on your individual tasks, see if they can be delegated (or bumped for later). Letting go and trusting can be a hard decision to make. But being Lead doesn’t give you the superpowers to do two people’s worth of work!
You may simply never become a better leader than a developer. And that’s A-OK.
You can’t be an impostor if you were never intended to be the captain of the ship in the first place. At the end of the day, coding is what you signed up to do. Being a Team Lead is only one way you can advance in your career, among other perfectly valid paths!
Even within Leads themselves, I would imagine that they primarily define their role as more technical and creative before managerial. And that’s not a bad thing at all.
Conclusion
Did my duties as a Team Lead take away from the things I already excelled in? I still don’t know. Some further soul searching it still due. But at least this journey has made for a pretty cool medium article topic.
If you’d like to get more informative stories like this, follow BACIC, where yours truly, Elvin Limpin, posts more of this.
