Becoming a Team Lead? Congratulations! If you are new to the role, gear up for one of the toughest challenges you would face with a high risk of transforming into a better engineer and leader. Leading an engineering team for the first time is like being swarmed with the debris in outerspace 👾. It's a frightening yet exciting experience, however once you survive the initial scare, you will find new worlds to explore. 🚀

Questions you need to ask yourself to prepare for the challenges:

1. How to balance between doing it yourself and delegating?

It's easy to overwork yourself and similarly its easy to lose touch by not doing enough! One should always be on a beware mode in this regard! Ideally, you shouldn't be spending more than 30% of your time managing stuff; otherwise, there won't be enough time to work on sizeable deliverables to push your engineering limits. Similarly, you don't want to owerwork yourself. Your team's growth enablement is your responsibility, and it needs dedicated time and mindshare.
However, it's okay to slide a bit on the either side of the spectrum to tackle specific situations. Couple of good examples would be performance reviews where you would need to spend more team as a team lead or a critical problem impacting users, demanding more engineering time.

2. How do you delegate and assign work?

It is easy to delegate work to people from their comfort zones. It indeed results in temporary productivity boost but it also stands in the way of enabling team members.
Doing more work is the recipe to get more experience and become more productive. The bigger picture to consider here is to enable everyone per their strengths and truly become a 10x team. You can be intuitive about it, but it's almost always better to find a systematic approach to improve methodically as you get more insights. For example, rotating the modules every sprint or after two sprints.

3. How to balance between features and housekeeping? How to onboard the stakeholders?

Setting the priority of housekeeping is problematic because it can be tricky to justify the value it brings. However, it's important to remember that housekeeping is vital to keep the codebase productive and teammates happy. Similarly, a crappy codebase can become a primary reason for your team members to leave. Please see this post for longer and more detailed insights on the topic.

4. How to define performance metrics for your team members?

It's easy to go overboard when defining goals for people around business and product. You need to align the personal development and interests as well. Finding the sweet spot is extremely hard and needs continuous iterative improvements with your team members.

5. How to measure the performance of your team members?

Be ready to give people feedback without any sugar coating yet in a positive manner. It’s hard but there is no way around it. Good feedback will give boost to people's careers. Performance reviews are a world on their own. Organizations may execute it via an automated tool, but, it's imperative to understand the philosophy and do them the right way. I am a huge fan of Gergely Orosz's work on the topic; please see this post on Pragmatic Engineer for more details.

6. How to manage your growth as an engineer and a Leader? How to become more effective?

It’s hard enough to manage the product backlog, team and team's performance yet one's individual contributions are important as well. The only way to cope without burning out is to be extremely effective.
It’s very easy to blunt your engineering skills on the job while trying to be a better lead. Finding the right balance between the two is very hard. As a lead, it's trivial to identify some aggressive managerial milestones and postpone the balance however it's important to realize that it's not about a certain milestone. The world changes fast and brings new challenges every day hence it's possible that you may never reach an optimal point where everything just fits in the balance by itself. Start doing little things everyday in order to maintain balance. Make better habits and processes to become more effective. Engineers must invest in becoming more and more effective but its even more important for team leads because they have to become good at both sides of spectrum to be an effective lead. Tip; read Effective Engineer, in fact, read it at the start of every year! It's a perfect reminder.

7. How to make your job easier?

Empower people around you. It is the only way to make your job easier over the time. Be ready to strategically empower people so that you have minimal dependencies. Be ready to give people wins to position them as winners. And of course, get ready to do 1-1s over lunch 🍕😀!

Tip; Sometimes it helps to go an extra mile and give fabricated wins to people to give them a taste for it. We all know how addictive success can be 😃.

Be ready to think about people’s careers, opportunities for them, and help them improve.
Tip; find and ask the right questions, make people think for themselves