Stepping Up as TeamLead in Time of Need
2023 was a very busy year for me at work. So, I planned to finish it with a quiet 4th Quarter where I’ll focus on performance improvement tasks, and I’ll have more time for mentoring and sharing knowledge.
But then, on October 7th, a war broke out in Israel, and all my plans were turned on their heads.
While trying to cope personally with my feelings of shock and sadness, and handle 3 kids without daycare/ Kindergarten / School, I found myself left with one other team member.
At regular times my position is Backend Tech Lead of the Cart&Checkout team in the busy EcomPlatform group in Wix. We’re a team of 5 consisting of a TeamLead, 3 other developers, and me.
I’ve had many times in my career where we needed to adapt to some change quickly, when someone was sick, or had personal issues.
This was different. Out of 5 team members, 2 were recruited to the army (including the TL), 1 just had a baby, and there was just one other developer left except for me.
Wix is a global company, and our customer's needs from us didn’t stop because there was a crisis in Israel. We had to keep the team going.
Being the most experienced I took over running the team.
Now, 3.5 months later, as I await the blessed return of my TL next week, is a good time to look back at the things I learned and share some important takeaways.
Being a team player
I think this came most intuitive to me, I was asked to take charge of the team and I said yes straight away. Over my 12.5 years in Wix, this has been the second time I was asked to step in as a Team Lead. So I knew I was capable of doing the job and I also knew I didn’t like running a team (I’ve been avoiding it for ages).
But it was obvious to me that I was needed here, so I agreed immediately. I think whatever your personal growth path is on regular times, needs to be set aside in favor of what is needed from you now. In the end, our goal is to help our customers and the company the most.
Handling the noise
The thing that surprised me the most was the amount of “noise” I had to handle daily. As we’re a platform and we have a lot of customers inside the company and outside, I kept being tagged in Slack conversations wanting my input, support tickets, and bugs. It was overwhelming and it took me a while to come to terms that this is a big part of the job.
A few things that helped me:
1. I reduced the number of tasks I assigned myself each sprint to leave time for it.
2. I started using the Slack option to “Save for later” so I could go over all the open threads needing my attention every morning and see what I could do to get them resolved
3. I had to be much more organized in my tasks list to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I created 2 lists, one for tasks I needed to do today and the second for tasks that I needed to follow their progress.
4. As the team members started coming back, I started to delegate tasks to other team members. And I realized that also handling “noise” can be delegated. This has always been hard for me, to trust other people and let go of tasks, but I feel I got much better at it.
Running a team
I don’t like managing people. I like mentoring, and I like running projects, but I’m not very fond of managing people (and not very good at it). I started by giving it my best effort, but I was very relieved when the TL of the front-end team came back to work and offered to manage the people on both teams.
I was left with managing the tasks and all the “noise”, but now all the 1:1 and managing the people was passed to him.
I think it was a good move since it can feel strange for developers to share personal issues with a teammate who they know is a temporary manager.
Having said that, I think this is an area I need to improve on, and maybe take such challenges better next time such challenge is dropped at me.
Planning
Traditionally the 4th Q is when we make the plans for 2024. This was the first time I took part in such planning and it was a fascinating process.
It started with talking to our main customers to get their requirements, understand the company's goals and targets for the year, hear the Product Managers plans, and collect our internal tasks and improvements.
Then I had to understand what exactly my team had to do to achieve those goals and tasks and try to quantify the capacity of the team so I could split the tasks between the 4 quarters.
Then for Q1 I drilled down and made a gantt of tasks for each team member, trying to make sure everyone gets both interesting tasks and maintenance tasks. I also tried to make sure I was shifting the tasks of different areas so the knowledge of the services would be shared between everyone.
I was surprised to find out I enjoyed this process, and I think I want to be more involved in it in the future.
This has been a very intense period, but I feel very satisfied looking at the team achievements in it and I’m proud that we managed to continue running the team smoothly.
I’ve learned a lot from it and I’m sure it will help me a lot in the future.
I appreciate even more what an amazing group of people I work with, and I’m very happy to be part of it.
My next challenge is managing to hand the team back smoothly and see how I can continue contributing.
