Tech Lead Roles & Responsibility

who are the technical leads? Lead programmer, senior developer who are technically way ahead of their teams. Who can visualize the project architecture better. Ideally, he should be superior, in terms of productivity, quality, maturity etc, than all the team members.

I have divided the R&R into 2 sections:

    1.  Project Responsibility

    2.  General Responsibility

Project Responsibility:

1. Own the Responsibility of the overall sprint or iteration outcome
2. Use project’s best practices and coding standards
3. Prepare and help team to prepare the design; should have a very good understanding of the project architecture
4. Coding and unit testing including JUnits
5. Conduct peer review and provide feedback
6. Remove the technical impediments
7. Update regular associates RAG (Red, Amber, Green) status; discuss the Red cases on the immediate basis with the project manager to help the manager in the attrition management
8. Update sprint tracker with accurate information to identify the risk and issues proactively at the sprint level
9. Conduct project risk identification and mitigation action planning with the PM at the project level
10. Participate in CAR and help in preparing the data
11. Conduct FIR; Process check master – to make sure that his team is following all the listed procedures
12. Constantly looking for ways to increase the team’s velocity/productivity by eliminates the waste. This should be one of the discussion points in the annual appraisal.
13. People management & Technical management
14. Help PM in the annual and mid-year appraisal process
15. Assist project manager in the project coordination/management
16. Report the status with alarms, explanations and solutions;

•       Promptly escalate issues to the reporting manager

•       Track and resolve issues

17. Target - Zero surprises; proactively react to the surprises with the detailed written explanation
18. Last but not the least, tech lead should be a reference book for your team members

General Responsibility:

1. Interface between team and management
2. Write quality code, set an example of quality in front of the team members
3. Gain the team’s respect with the quality of your work and by doing what you are preaching
4. Define early on what success means for you, the team and the business

•       Set reasonable expectations in front of the team

5. Should be part of the design team

•       Should have design vision and understanding

6. Be firm but fair
7. Admit your mistakes
8. Build and maintain high team morale
9. Should not be biased towards any individual professionally but personally you can J
10. Task assignment should be fair

•       Tasking should be done with the team together

•       Match people and tasks based on their skills and their personal preference

•       Work the estimate with the team

11. Try to become a role model for the team
12. Take necessary measures to avoid centralization of knowledge. There should not be any dependency in the project on anybody.
13. Mentor people; It is your job to raise the education level of your team
14. Quality with on time delivery of agreed deliverable
15. Team can approach lead any time for any functional or technical concern

•       Tech lead requires balancing between technical and leadership talents.

16. Lead should Motivate/encourage the team members

•       Especially when team is under pressure with the tight deadline

17. Lead should share the limelight with the team
18. Don’t blame anybody publicly for anything
19. Work as hard or harder than anyone else in the team
20. Focus on the technologies associated with the software or application you are building. Learn those technology thoroughly
21. Flexible enough to work under different work environments settings
22. Fun @ work

At the end, always say “WE” instead of “I”