A Squad leader, why though?
We are making many improvements in our organization at TheFork, especially on the tech side of the company. With the will to double our staff in the next five years, a new lot of challenges come with it.
One of them is that all senior engineering managers will now need to manage 12 people, which in our process starts to take them some time, 30 minutes for each dev being devoted to one-to-one meetings. With these 12 developers being split into two teams, an engineering manager will not have the time to take into account every single thing that will be happening inside a team, and will sometime need to leave one team to spend more time with the other.
Please, welcome, the squad leader
📦 A role:
At TheFork, a squad leader is a role endorsed by a member of a tech team. It is not a position and does not imply a promotion. A squad leader has the same decision power as any member of a team but might code a bit less than other members when taking care of their duties.
👀 A global overview:
The first important task of a squad leader is to communicate, aggregate, and transmit a global overview of a team’s progress to its engineering manager. They’ll need to be aware of all ongoing tasks and provide advice on where to go next.
📆 A task planner to reduce pain:
Although they do not bear the responsibility of any task, a squad leader needs to plan ahead to reduce any issues in a close future. If they do not bear the responsibility to do any analysis it will be part of their job to discover such subjects and/or to aggregate all topics that could lead to one of them.
🤝 Support in decision making:
A squad leader’s role is also to be aware of decisions that would need to be taken and to provide a platform for any discussion to arise and be concluded. Either by starting meetings or reaching people but to ensure that at the end of the day a decision is made. If no consensus is reached then they’ll escalate the issue to the relevant person.
What’s not a squad lead attribution?
👨💼 A manager:
A squad leader is not a manager, he does not have more power than anyone in the team and will not “Take care” of the team as a manager will do. They will not plan ahead of other things than for technical purposes, will not define personal objectives, and do not place themselves above the team. As said before “squad leader” is a role, not a promotion, and does not imply any power in decision making.
🔧 A tech lead:
A squad lead will not have the last word on used tech nor promote any tech as part of the squad leader (that could happen in parallel but the role does not force it)
🧑⚖️ An arbitrator:
It is not the job of a squad leader to decide what solution will be used or which element should be true. If a consensus is not found, if a conflict arises, if there is a compromise to be taken because we lack time, it will not be the responsibility of the squad leader to answer, but to look for the relevant people to talk to (most of the time this will be the engineering manager, the product manager or the architectural team)
Conclusion
Our teams are now starting to integrate this new role and its new attribution. Only tested on the B2B side of our tech world, this role might be implemented elsewhere if the experiment is successful here. But as always this is not a hardcoded guidebook to what a Squad leader should be and even what they want to be. A discussion must be maintained inside a team to confirm and adjust how the squad leader should drive their team what aspect should be reinforced and which aspect could be toned down. This will allow them to better provide for their team and not spend any unnecessary energy on useless tasks.
