🧢 👨‍👦‍👦 🈷️ Who is techlide and why is the team needed it 🍘 ✌🏽 ♣️

We recently wrote how we started a conference entirely devoted to engineering processes and practices. Our goal is to gather in one place professionals who develop technical leadership of the company, product and give them the opportunity to share experience, discuss their tasks and problems of the industry, together find new approaches. We thought for a long time what unites such people as how to recognize them. And they realized that they were technlides. It is they who are responsible for the technological vector, implement the same engineering practices and set up processes.

But in our industry, even the grading of junior / middle / senior posts is enormously different from company to company. What can we say about technical support, which is not a position at all, but a role. Therefore, we decided to figure out what they invest in this concept most often. At the same time, outline the areas of responsibility, formulate the key technical skills and finally understand how tehlide differs from team lead (Spoiler: team lead is also a role, so one person can be both tech team and team lead. And maybe not).

Disclaimer: As part of the article of any specialist involved in the development of an IT product, we call an engineer so as not to make a reservation each time: programmer, tester, operation engineer, etc.

The article is based on the experience of the Program Committee, supported by 50 product interviews that we conducted. This can not be considered a large-scale study of the entire industry, but our sample is representative enough to notice some characteristic features.

Let's start with the main thing.

Tehlid is a role

Moreover, often - informal. Once an engineer is in the team the most experienced and proactive, he becomes an informal leader and begins to “drown” for improving engineering practices. That’s it, he’s already a technid, and, as a rule, there is no turning back.

If you dig even deeper, then this is a mindset and a special attitude to responsibility, proactivity. These qualities are difficult to inculcate from scratch, but you can create favorable conditions for them to manifest. Therefore, if you see burning eyes, help them not to fade away.

In general, most likely in Russia, techlides will soon become a post. Because there should be a person in the team who devotes most of his time to improving the effectiveness of the team, not only from the point of view of people and their interaction, but from the technical side.

What does techlide do

Of course, this greatly depends on the specifics of the team and the company and on the direction of the lead itself. Probably, one should not expect help from the mobile development of mobile development in deploying Kubernetes (but this also happens :)). We have identified top-level tasks that are independent of the stack:

Defines a technology stack for specific projects or tasks.
Takes responsibility for the implementation of new approaches to the development, testing, delivery and selection of new technologies.
Builds processes (for example, CI / CD, code review), implements and develops engineering practices.
Minimizes risks for product development associated with technical limitations, overcomes technical blockers for business.
Defines the technological strategy for the development of a project or product, works for the future.
Responsible for the quality of implementation, product.
Develops technical skills of members of his team.
It solves technically complex tasks that other engineers in the team are not able to solve.

In general, this can be defined as “raising the level of technical excellence”. To do this, you must take many technical decisions yourself, and create conditions so that the team can make and implement some of them independently.

Tehlid should focus not so much on what technical decision to make, but how to help the team make the right technical decisions. Not how to gash feature X, but how to help the team make it “2 times faster, 4 times cheaper and without bugs”.

In this sense, technical work increases the efficiency of the development team: production time decreases, testing is faster, the team allows fewer bugs, and the technical debt level decreases. Without someone who cares about the quality and adequacy of technical solutions, only short-term success can be achieved. The technical debt of short-term solutions works like a loan - at some point, the business will simply pay more in interest than for core value. Therefore, it is so important to balance in the desire of the business to realize more business functionality, and to defend the interests of the team on the right to write good code.

If no one in the company takes responsibility for the quality of the product, then you can’t be sure that this product (if, of course, with this approach can survive at all) will not face downtime, loss of customer data or at least large-scale refactoring. Conversely, a timely technical solution can save business millions.

The main qualities of technical

On the knowledge and level of technical expertise in the Program Committee, opinions were divided. Someone's experience suggests that techlide is the strongest engineer in the team, and someone has met the jones performing the role of techlide in a particular problem. Therefore, let us dwell on the fact that techlide must understand the technical side enough not to build bicycles unnecessarily and to be able to accurately understand everything that is needed. And then - situationally, depending on what he does.

But in what qualities technical persons should have in the broadest sense, the colleagues were rather unanimous. For TechLead Conf we will prepare a detailed map of the development of technical competencies, but the top-level basis turned out to be very impressive.

Able to see problems, notices in the daily routine that needs improvement.
He is not indifferent to the processes in the company and the decisions made.
Ready to take responsibility for decision making.
He thinks systematically in order to make long-term decisions and work in conditions of uncertainty.
Clearly conveys his thoughts and justifies the usefulness of the proposed changes.
He is a leader, knows how to lead people and teach them what he can do.
He takes into account the opinion of his colleagues and knows how to negotiate, and sometimes he firmly defends his position.
He can quickly understand the subject area and understands how technical solutions affect real life.
It has a broad outlook, keeps a finger on the pulse of modern technology.

And the techlide, like any high-class specialist, must think about how he thinks. Must understand mental models and tune them.

Should techlide work with hands

The short answer is yes. Otherwise, it will lose touch with reality, skills will begin to degrade, and this certainly will not add credibility to the team. If we are talking about technical support, the role of which is played by the most experienced engineer, then he can be a “playing coach”. In this case, colleagues will see the effect of the work. And to learn by example is one of the most reliable options for implementing any practice: from using linter, to reading useful books or speaking at conferences.

On the other hand, if most of the time is devoted directly to development, then there may not be enough for something from our first list of technical tasks. At certain stages in the formation of a company, techlide may be dominated, for example, by research or mentoring tasks. Then it is unlikely that the team should count on the techlide to take on some sort of food task. He can sometimes work with someone in a pair, smuggle in open-source or experiment in a pet-project. The main thing is “do not lose your grip” and master new technology stacks.

Is it possible without tehlida

It is possible, but not for long. In a hypothetical Stagnaciland, perhaps there are companies with established development processes that have reached a level of income that suits them and are not going to grow. They can afford not to change anything. In the real world, you won’t be able to stand still; industry neighbors are moving so fast that you don’t want to, but you need to adapt, introduce a new and promising one.

The need for a person who cares about quality and who takes the initiative to implement engineering practices is dictated by the industry. Moreover, this need arises as soon as the development team appears, and someone immediately begins to play this role. It is worth keeping this in mind when creating a new team: there must be a person with the necessary technical competencies. It is better for the business to clearly know who will play this role and consider this when hiring. Otherwise, the role of techlide can lie on the shoulders of a person who does not correspond to her, but simply speaks loudest.

We can say that at the start of a product, a company in the IT field of techlides is most needed. Starting with the launch of MVP, companies often forget that they are likely to become a tech debt. At the beginning of the journey it’s not up to technological qualitytherefore, we will show at the conference how to avoid this problem .

But also with the development of the project, who, if not techlide, will monitor the technological well-being of the company, who guarantees that in a couple of months they will not have to merge most of the budget and deadlines for the bug fix. Yes, even new features without it will appear too slowly. And in the future, without techlide, even the most convenient and high-quality product can turn into you know yourself that both customers and developers themselves will hate.

You say, what about team responsibility? And no one says that the role cannot be distributed. It is often blurred, and then we can say that there is not a single leader, but a leader in the front-end, a leader in mobile development, a leader in testing, etc. That is, techlide is responsible for its domain area, for one product or project.

Thus, a team or company can have any number of techlides. A voice from the audience suggests that the optimal number of techlides in the company is 42. Well, because all that huge amount of knowledge does not fit into one head, and all responsibility on one shoulders will not hold on. Up to the point that if a team starting as a startup has been working in a stable composition for several years, has shared all its competencies with each other, everyone has achieved the perfect T-shape, and everyone completely trusts each other to make technical decisions, then there may not be a leader. There are zero Tekhlids in such a team, and at the same time everyone plays this role.

How techlide differs from other roles and posts

Of course, comparing technical and senior engineer is not entirely correct, because one is a role, and the second is usually a position. Senior may well be tehlid, but may not be. Below we are trying to determine how the engineer in the role of techlide differs from those who do not play this role, but also has a high level of expertise and responsibility.

Do not take these comparisons too seriously, we know that in different companies everything can be different. But if you still notice that most of the technical characteristics are relevant to you, and at the same time you do not consider yourself to them, then welcome to the club :)

Tehlid vs Senior

Senior engineer	Tekhlid
Single player	Team player.
Most often experienced in one direction of development.	Looks at development more broadly, can solve problems at the junction of directions.
Most of the time working develops business functionality.	Few directly writes the code, perhaps it does not create features for business at all.
Responsible for your code.	Responsible for the quality of the product as a whole.
Develops its expertise, deeply versed in details.	Develops the technical skills of the team, shares its experience as much as possible.

In-depth knowledge and self-sufficiency of a senior engineer is very useful in a team. But if the team will consist only of single stars, then team work is unlikely to succeed.

Tehlid vs Timlid

The difference between techlide and timlide is both the most obvious and the most vague. If you ask about this person who combines both roles, and is called, for example, the project manager, then the testimony will be confused.

But if we turn to the experience of companies in which the team has both team leader and technical leader, we will understand that team leader works with people and focuses on communication processes in a team, team leader with resources and engineering processes. Tehlid is unlikely to monitor whether Petya will burn out, and is it really convenient for Seryozha to work with Vasya. And also the issues of purchasing equipment, participating in conferences, teambuilding, salaries and bonuses - this is definitely not for techlide.

It turns out that tehlide may not be a timlide, but a timlide may be a teclide. On the other hand, the team leader may not have such deep knowledge, and the technical team is definitely needed.

Therefore, at our conference there will be no purely soft-skill reports on how to conduct 1-to-1 and build trust relationships in a team - this will leave TeamLead Conf . We will discuss how to select and implement suitable engineering practices, how to achieve technical excellence and build engineering processes.

Tehlid vs CTO

Everything is simple here. In small companies, it can be one and the same person: one who has more technical expertise and strategic thinking. In large companies, service stations already have other concerns, so people on the ground are needed who can independently develop products or platforms. From the moment when the company has more than three sufficiently independent development teams, the service station determines the general line, makes key architectural decisions or helps to find a way out if the teams cannot agree. STO, in fact, manages techlides that operate at a more local level.

So (maybe until you came up with CTO Conf), there will be a lot of usefulness at the TechLead Conf conference for CTO. And of course, this is not only reports, but also the opportunity to discuss modern approaches and problem areas of the industry with other technical experts and CTOs.

How to become a techlide

If you have this question (and even more so you have read up to this point), then half the job is done. As we understood today, techlide is the most proactive and responsible engineer in the team. Therefore, you need not sit still, not be afraid to step forward, take responsibility, be interested in the world around you, and build up the most diverse experience.

This is what TechLead Conf program committee recommends paying attention to:

Alik Kurdyukov (UnitedTraders): First, self-organization is needed. Initiative will not be of any use if you use your resources inefficiently. In my opinion, the best Russian-language book on this subject is “The Jedi Techniques” by Maxim Dorofeev ( the basic concepts can be found in the report by Maxim Dorofeev at RIT ++) Secondly, you need to be able to defend your decisions - sales materials will help, for example, the book “First say“ No ”by Jim Camp.

Alexander Matveev (Avito): Get involved in what you do. Constantly developing, reading books and articles, trying to apply the acquired knowledge in practice is a prerequisite. The experience of applying approaches and practices will gradually accumulate and will allow achieving a new quality. And in parallel, it is necessary to develop strategic thinking in order to better see the prospects of certain technical solutions.

Evgeny Sabirov(TELEMED.CHAT, GK HOST): First you need a certain mindset: at each specific moment in the development of processes, understand what can be done better and due to what. And then we’ll already study the specific routes with which you can come to this “best tomorrow”. The more routes will be mastered, the faster will be new.

Evgeny Dubovik (Cinimex): You need to be the most authoritative, technically savvy and proactive guy / girl in the team. And at the same time, enjoy the fact that you have to drag the piano, on which others will play.

Anton Bevzyuk(Raiffeisenbank): Do not sit still and constantly learn what is interesting to the person himself. To develop two hands: to study modern engineering practices, tools, frameworks and classical programming disciplines, on how to correctly and cleanly write clean code.

Viet Nguyen (MegaLabs): To broaden your horizons and constantly tune your mental models and thinking tools - start now !

Evgeni Ivanchenko (DODO PIZZA): To become a techlide, you need to dive deep into the domain area. The tools and technologies that are used in this area. Pump the necessary soft skills and not be afraid to take responsibility.

Julia Dolbilova(DODO PIZZA): How to become a tech lead, speakers at our conference will tell better.

Come to TechLead Conf , see how techlides live in different companies and you can definitely evaluate what else can be pumped. Or, if you want to share your best practices and draw attention to those aspects of the technical lead that seem most important to you, send us a request for a report . While these may be short abstracts with the main ideas, we at the Program Committee will help to make the report as useful as possible precisely for the audience of technical experts.

Connect to the telegram channel and chat of the conference - we publish news in the channel, discuss them in the chat and ask your opinion about future TechLead Conf topics and reports.

Who is techlide and why is the team needed it