The document lists the scope, requirements and and the timeline for professional development for Team leads in product and engineering.
Team leads can spend part of one day a week digging into some aspects of the plan.
The goal of the project is to bring structure and focus to the team lead’s existing activities, like delivering feedback on regular 1x1s, having team meetings or speaking at all-hands.
It does not require any additional activities aside from reading material and continuous practice.
The project is designed to help team leads with 3 critical components of their daily jobs:
- Delegation
- Feedback
- Team Communication
Improving on these skills that are part of the team leads' daily interactions is a key to building effective teams. It equips team members with better tools to achieve success.
Effective delegation incorporates the following key information in all design documents, GitHub issues, and communication (like over Slack or in 1:1s):
-
Scope of the project - what should be delivered, for example MVP or research document or production ready feature.
-
Success criteria - what is considered a success? Scalability, security and other requirements should be communicated to subordinates.
-
Timeline - when developers are supposed to deliver the result.
This framework helps team members to efficiently execute the task, as it becomes clear to them what is the importance, scope and constraints of the project and when the execution is considered a success.
Required reading material outlining best practices when estimating the timelines and scoping:
Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects
This book will make team leads better in their risk assessment. It will help to achieve better estimates in friendly collaboration with their team members.
-
Team leads have demonstrated examples of GitHub issues and google documents covering scope, success criteria and timeline analysis following best practices.
-
Team leads are listing risks and collaborating with their team members to name and define the timeline and scope of the project.
-
Team leads present design document and GitHub issues that follow the best practices that got to completion.
Delivering quality feedback during 1x1 and day to day interactions is a key component of effective team leadership.
Good feedback is:
- Objective and focused. Feedback focuses on very specific aspects of the execution by showing examples and measures it against some common benchmark. For example, “This code piece should be improved to meet the standard by adding code coverage, end to end tests covering fail-over scenarios”.
- Timely. It is best delivered in the context of a conversation, code review that recently took place.
- Helps to improve. The feedback is focused on improving the outcomes of the work.
- Avoids anti-patterns - being too vague to properly interpret, delivered as a pack of other non-related information.
- Radical Candor Part 1, chapter 2
- High output management. Performance appraisal.
- The manager’s path Managing people. Performance reviews.
- Team leads incorporated continuous factual feedback as a part of the daily interactions with their team members.
- Self reflections of subordinates reflect improvements of the quality and consistency of the feedback.
As a wrap up of the feedback project, team leads will prepare a couple of examples of them delivering feedback to subordinates that addressed complex issues and helped team members to improve.
Team leads are responsible for several key components of communication:
- Conversations with the team members during 1x1s .
- Feedback sessions and support calls with customers.
- Team and company all hands presentations.
This section focuses on improving communication to the outside of the team through:
- Setting high quality OKRs and reporting on them regularly and transparently.
- Clearly communicating team progress during all hands and team meetings.
Team leads have successfully delivered all hands presentations that follow the best practices and communicated team priorities. Outside team peers delivered the feedback on improving the OKRs quality that exhibit best practices - using continuous metrics and avoiding using feature lists.