The ideal Technical Leader we all deserve in a team

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Lately I've been asking myself: What is the mindset that a real technical leader should have?

Throughout my career as a team leader I have nurtured, iterated, improved and optimized some skills to execute this role, and in this first instance is where I define what from my perspective should have the ideal technical leader that we all deserve in a team:

• You must have a good experience designing and building solutions for the industry, which allows you to provide an extended vision when defining the architecture of an effective, fast and low impact solution.
• Make quick decisions to guide the team at key moments where nobody knows what to do or how to act.
• Decision making always separates the professionals who contribute value and those who do not. Given this, definitely a technical leader must have a good decision making, but without being taxable, must have the tools to know how to expose, explain, co-create them with the team and directing them so they see the advantages and disadvantages of such taking decisions.
• Help the vision and knowledge of the team grow.
• Listen to the opinions of the group and put themselves in the shoes of its members, with the aim of making sound decisions taking into account all perspectives and possible realities.
• Humble, a team is satisfied because the skills and abilities of each complement those of the other.
• Be aware of each and every one of the details that the team implements, so that, at the time of an unforeseen or threat, you can analyze and act with caution, thus providing quick and effective solutions.
• Quickly detect bad decisions or threats that may arise before they materialize.
• Go transferring knowledge to team members, so that they become multiplying agents.
• Respond adequately to the blockages technically suffered by the members of the team and in turn guide the correct growth of each of the members.
• It is not a superhero who must know all of them, but it must be clear about the references for technical questions and have the team aware of that information for the moments of: "in case of … break the glass".
• It is important to preach and apply with the example and not only at the level of technical practices but with attitudes towards other people, I believe that this generates a base of trust, respect and coherence in a professional.
• Assist team members in the estimation of tasks to make visible things that they ignore in the construction of these, trying to level the speed of the team with each iteration of development, having clear that yes very well has a fast pace when performing the tasks, the other members of the team may not have the same rhythm, which can translate into errors in the estimates and discomforts in the team.
• Ensure the efficiency, integrity and quality of the product developed by the team to apply good practices and development standards and help the speed of the team to maintain and increase over time.
• Provide continuous and proactive technical assistance to each team member, in order to guarantee the success of each one of them in the project.
• To translate what the software architect plans by specifying the practical details for the team, and in turn, to translate the technical details of the team into the business language for either the owner or the sponsor of the product.
• Knowing how to communicate, since in this way it is possible to get messages to the group correctly and efficiently.
• Have a set of tools that help the tasks of product development and in turn share them with the team to improve the execution of these.
• Be able to write and teach easy-to-understand and scalable code applying development standards, clean code, refactoring techniques, design patterns, peer-to-peer programming and promote the use of test creation and apply them on a day-to-day basis in product development .
• And the biggest challenge is to be able to detect, visualize, evaluate its impact, plan and prioritize technical debt in order to negotiate it with the owner of the product and to minimize it over time.

And in this article I do not mention agile methodologies, because the independent technical leader of the methodology that the organization implements does not interfere with the mindset described above.

Before finishing this article, I would like to ask you how do you see the role of technical leader in your teams and in the industry?

I leave you with the following sentence:

"We must use time wisely, and realize that it is always the right time to do things right"Nelson Mandela.

Author: Heileen Goodson

Head of Press: Carolina Castillo

Original post published here.