The Path to Great Relationships Part #1. Technical Lead and Project Manager

Everything PM should know about employing the best Technical Lead to any project.

Picking the right team is half of a PM’s success. And a huge challenge. I’m Project Manager, leading two projects for one of the biggest US enterprises, and I faced cases related to staffing and building relationships with team members. Therefore, I decided to interview my top-notch colleagues to get to know their tricks for picking the right teammates.

In the first article, we’re talking about Tech Lead as it’s a core of the team. How to find a perfect match and establish practical cooperation?

We addressed this question to Tetiana Shkurchenko — Program Manager at SoftServe with 4 years of experience in the IT industry on more than 15 projects. Tetiana has worked in SoftServe for 2 years already and currently manages the direction combining 7 projects. She is the prominent expert in staffing and building teams as 4 of them were created only during the previous business quarter! In this article, we will share Tetiana’s insights from our fascinating discussion.

From the start: how to pick up the right person for a Technical Lead Role?

Profile of the right candidate

First, I would like to highlight that on my projects Technical Lead (next — TL) covers the everyday responsibilities of this role and some responsibilities of Team Lead additionally. As a Project Manager (next — PM) my goal is to form a self-managed independent team, so if, for any reason, I am absent for a few months the project will not be blocked.

While preparing for the interview, I am mindful of the above. I would suggest that every PM ask the following question before searching for the right candidate: “What are my expectations of the person I’m looking for?”. Mine can be formulated shortly: “Technical Lead — it is me, but with technical background”.

Most of the time managers meet candidates with a powerful technical profile but with a lack of needed soft skills. No matter what role we are talking about — Technical or Team Lead — in my opinion, any lead role should be obtained by a person who could drive the team. SoftServe is not a “body shop”, we offer service and solutions. In this perspective, a TL position is important, especially, if the Project Manager is non-technical. In this case, they should complement each other.

My perfect candidate is:

• Responsible. PM should not work on growing this quality from scratch and dig into “babysitting”.
• Proactive “out-of-the-box” thinker. TL should be ready to generate ideas for a project and product improvements and do not hesitate to participate in realization.
• Team-player. There is a team behind every TL that requires attention and support.

Of course, one interview can’t guarantee that you will find your “total match”, but at least with some techniques is it possible to lower the risk to staff wrong person. So, what are my interview tips& tricks?

How to check TL’s soft skills during an interview?

I like to challenge candidates describing some cases that might happen with clients, team, management, etc. For example, to model situation, such as, candidates need to travel from Ivano-Frankivsk to Lviv to run important meeting that can’t go without them. They are on the way, 4 hours left until the event start, when the car suddenly breaks. Then I ask candidates what they will do. Let’s imagine, candidates answer that they will fix the car and move on. In this case I will continue challenging with one more obstacle like long traffic jam. I think, you got the point — my goal is to describe the stalemate when everything is against of success of my candidate. The is a big range of solutions, for example, options with taxi, or people can be ready to run with the laptop looking for the nearest connection to run the meeting from the café with the Internet.

What I want to get from this case:

• Creative thinking
• Desire to solve the problem
• Intention to successfully deal with the issue till the end
• Emotional attitude to the situation

If I hear after the first challenge: “I will call my manager and tell that I can’t make it”, I understand that this is not the person with whom we could work together because of the lack of desired soft skills. Also, I like to model cases about conflicts in the team or stressful situations, for example, when the team doesn’t meet deadline. I don’t like hearing something like: “It is not my job to manage it”.

Also, I like to ask candidate about the previous experience, something like, the biggest challenge at the former company, or biggest achievement. Even the evident question like “Why are you in a search for new working place?” could lead to the conclusion.

These are some simple but powerful tools that may help you get to know the candidate better and analyze if you both think in the same direction.

Double power: How to build good relationships?

Goals and responsibility

So, you found your perfect TL match. What`s next? Building synergy and trust. On my projects, we are eager to build strong teams and bring value for the customer, that’s why leaders on the project should work as one. Here`s what helps me achieving it:

• Goals. Yes, it may sound obvious, but it is important to define clear goals for your TL. A good practice when you as a manager conform TL’s goals to yours to reflect the common strategy. With setting objectives, you do not only make commitments with your subordinate. You can show a “big picture” and roadmap to your TL, and it can easily drive him!
• Responsibilities. I would suggest talking with your TL about “who is doing what”. Even though the key responsibilities of PM and TL are obvious, every company and project has its features. By the way, with this conversation, you show transparency on your activities so TL can easily evaluate your effort.
• Motivation. Do not forget about this stage. As a manager, you need to show that you are fearless and open to any even crazy ideas. Also, you need to share passion, because leaders just cannot build brilliant teams and projects without this component. You need TL’s support with the goals and motivation of the teammates, so do not forget to encourage your leader.

Conflicts or when you join the team with Technical Lead

I would like to share the case from my practice that happened before I joined SoftServe. Once, I became part of the team with the Technical Lead who had been already working for some time on the project. It was a challenge for us to find a common language as we were different people. Any discussion led to disagreements between us, so our delivery leaders and team members felt that something went wrong. This situation hit the critical point when we showed the misalignments during the meetings with customers — while discussing, I was sharing my arguments from the business perspective and my TL showed completely different views.

Of course, I decided that having an honest conversation is the key to a solution. While preparing for the meeting I tried to consider this situation from his point of view and analyze his motivation to create the correct message. I realized that he was in love with the product, and his main driver and objective was the success of the project. For some reason, he perceived me as an enemy who wanted to prevent him from achieving his goal. That is why I shared with him that we were in one boat and I had the same motivation. Also, we split our responsibilities and roles to give room for each of us. I highlighted my strong sides to show him where I could provide my support. Also, from that moment, I described the reason for every decision and request I did.

For example, I wanted to collect metrics and my TL was against this, so I described to him that we needed to show transparency to the client and our value. Of course, it was not important for me to rule this process, I intended on the result and he could be the responsible activity. And it worked! He covered metrics set-up and collection.

With such kind of communication, our relationships became completely different in only 1 month. We started to collaborate, building our strategy together. TL asked for advice about communication with the team and it was a pleasure for me to help him.

What about development for Technical Leads?

Every manager should think about the career growth and development of subordinates. Sometimes, engineers do not understand what they need to do outside of the technical sphere to become a rock-star TL or even Architect in the future.

Sharing specific and key areas of improvement for TLs, according to my point of view:

• Stepping outside of the comfort zone. What I mean here is that the PM should motivate TL to be ready to perform something new and above the current responsibilities. For example, prepare and run presentations, contribute to the pre-sales talk, set-up one-on-one with the team-member to share feedback, etc.
• Develop a “helicopter view”. PM relies a lot on the TL when it comes to business development as it requires research, client interviews, and proof of concept creation. TL should be ready to not think only in terms of his or her project but be able to take a look from the broader perspective. This could be possible with the product architecture exploration, challenging tasks performing, close communication with stakeholders from the customer’s side, studying the new technologies, etc.
• Learning some managers’ magic. If you work with the team, there are a lot of areas to be focused on, like the art of interviewing candidates, feedback sharing approaches, basic stakeholder analysis, ways of communication with the team. For example, on my projects, we pay attention to the learning sessions with Communication Experts for the Technical Leads. Also, our TLs are involved in every staffing process and they make decisions about candidates together with PMs. That is why soft skills are a mandatory component of career growth for every leader.

Of course, I don’t push person on the above. It is necessary for TL to be motivated for development. I have regular one-on-one meetings with every team-member where we have a chance to discuss development roadmap and career opportunities. If we both come up with the need for my subordinate to become better in some specific area, we have the next process:

• Set up a clear and specific goal. Manager and team-member should be able to answer the question if the goal was achieved or not. That’s why we write down clear success statement with the easy action items. Good thing to use here some techniques like SMART goals.
• Resources. It is important step — to provide your subordinate with the required tools for achieving the goal. Big range of help that managers can provide at SoftServe — to find the needed course in SoftServe University, to purchase the needed book or certification, assign the mentor in the company, to find the expert to help with the specific task or project in the Center of Excellence, to set-up and run the workshop about the relevant topic, etc.
• Progress tracking. It depends on the goal, but usually we just go back to this point during the one-on-one meetings and talk about status. In case the goal is to work on the separate big project, I could set up separate sync-ups, but this should be discussed.
• Reward. It depends on the goal, but it is good to commend person for the success. Bonuses, salary increase, promotion, good feedback on the team or company level, etc. — everything will work.

We’ll continue to walk you along the Path to Great Relationships of Project Manager with other team-mates in the next articles. Wait for PM & DevOps cooperation material.