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Recently, my colleagues and I were at TeamLeadConf - this is a conference about management, motivation, hiring, processes and other things useful to team leaders.

Usually after conferences we share our impressions with those who did not attend the conference. The most popular format is a list of top reports with short notes, which is sent in Slaka and by mail.

This time I wrote this review for colleagues and thought: why not publish these notes for everyone? So the text on Wiki was reborn into this article.



This year at TeamLeadConf there were 30+ reports, 4 workshops and several meetings (there are no entries). I looked at almost all the reports (some offline at the conference, some in the recording), and identified 15 of them, which seemed to be the most relevant for my work, or which could be recommended to beginner team leaders.

Disclaimer: your opinion and perception of reports can radically differ from mine, because we have different experiences, different companies and teams. Nevertheless, I hope that this review will help readers choose useful reports.

There are also official top reports based on the results of the vote. A playlist of these reports is available here .

Lead Basic Tools Reports


According to Egor Tolstoy, every year in Russia 7 thousand new timlids appear . And it is no secret that often they are the best developers. And nobody taught the best developers to work with people. It’s great if the company has established processes and experienced colleagues who will transfer knowledge. But what if not?

Especially for those who recently became a team leader, I highlighted a separate list of reports on basic tools - individual development plans (IPR), 1-on-1 meetings, onboarding, and work with junior developers. Our team has already implemented such practices, but with good conscience I recommend these reports to our novice leads.

“Management of individual development of team members”, Pavel Filonov




IPR (individual employee development plan) is a convenient tool for managing the development of each team member. When used correctly, IPR is useful for both the employee and his manager. Pavel talks about his experience in building IPR, gives examples of plans and feedback to colleagues.

The report will be useful primarily to those who have never drawn up a development plan or are just starting to implement this practice.

Presentation

“Make everyone up: onboarding new employees”, Alexander Afenov




A lot depends on how the first months of a new employee in the company go: how quickly he joins the team, when he begins to perform at full strength, whether he wants to stay. Alexander talks about how onboarding works at Lamoda.

The report will be most useful to those who still do not have clear processes for adapting new employees (then I also recommend the “Guide for Pokémon trainers: how to grow and when to let go”, see below). But even those who have such processes will be able to borrow some practices. For myself, I noted the following points:

  • Allocation to the newcomer buddy - an assistant who will answer questions and communicate with a person instead of the forever busy team lead (in general, we also tried this, but still the team leader does this more often).
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The phrase “We need to talk” is a terrible dream of many team leaders. This beginning of a dialogue does not bode well. The first thing that comes to mind: my employee is demotivated, burned out and wants to leave.

In his report, Mikhail talks about one-on-one meetings as a way to find out about problems as they arise and gives advice on how to conduct such meetings often, where, what questions to ask, etc.

I have one-on-one experience of meetings, but took a couple of ideas:

  • As tools you can try Trello, Impraise, Monday.com. So far I looked only at Trello, but to start a board for each employee seemed not very convenient (if there are a lot of them).
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Maria and Alevtina give advice on working with employees of different types and at different stages of their life in the company.

For example, beginners need onboarding, which can include a detailed weekly plan, project guides, a project knowledge questionnaire, performance review and one-on-one meetings. For each of these points, the girls shared their recommendations.

Other types of employees that were discussed: easily distracted colleagues, toxic comrades, hyperresponsible experienced employees. By the way, the report is built on the original principle - each type of employee is named as a Pokémon: charmanders, snorlaks, coffing and mute (it was hard for me without knowledge of Pokemon).

She categorized this report as “for beginning team leaders”, because all the techniques are quite simple and most likely they are already used in mature teams or experienced team leaders.

She took note of the questionnaires on knowledge of the project as part of onboarding.

Presentation

“How to work with juniors?”, Seryozha Popov




Seryozha's report is addressed to team leaders who have not worked with junior developers before but want to try. We are talking about the features of hiring, onboarding and feedback for such inexperienced colleagues.

We have our own processes for attracting young specialists ( Tinkoff Fintech School , internship programs ), but if there weren’t, I would take note of the following ideas from the report:

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Previous reports were good, but still they were the basics. In this section I will give a review of the reports, which dealt with less common or more advanced tools, as well as about the unique experience of the speakers.

“Career Levels in Wargaming, Platform”, Ilya Roslyakov




For me it was the most top-notch and useful report at the conference. The guys at Wargaming are implementing career levels (similar to Google’s level system). This is something more advanced than the junior, middle, senior levels that are often operated on in IT. In addition, the levels from Ilya's report are applicable not only to developers.

Career levels are convenient for forming expectations from an employee, for answering the question “How and where should I grow?” and generally significantly increase openness. Ilya talks about how they were introduced in Wargaming, how to draw boundaries between levels and determine the requirements for each of them. All this can be an excellent starting point for the implementation of career levels in your organization.

I recommend this report to the leaders of large teams and departments.

Presentation

“Who is Who: Tech Lead, Team Lead, Engineering Manager”, Denis Chernobay




Another report that I really liked. Perhaps because we are actively discussing this topic at work, and the information came in very handy.

In his report, Denis talks about who are team leaders, technical managers and engineering managers using the example of Monzo (startup, where the roles of technical experts and engineering managers were singled out in 2019) and Google (where this division has been around for a long time). He also shares his experience of using this role separation in Badoo.

It seems that the distinction between techlides and “pure IT managers” is still not very common, they often talk about team lead, which is both a Swiss, a reaper, and a dude player: he writes the code and is responsible for the architecture, is responsible for the development and motivation of the team, one-on-one meetings one and that’s all that sets up the processes.

Some developers fall into a kind of career “trap”: the guys like to make cool technical solutions, but they also want growth and the role of team leader seems to be a natural development. And along with this role (which, by the way, is not suitable for everyone), there are a lot of responsibilities for working with the team and customers, and now there is no time left for technical pieces. Instead of a motivated developer, we got a sad team lead writing code at night.


If this problem is familiar to you, then the separation of the roles of techlides in charge of technology and managers in charge of people can help you. Denis's report is a great opportunity to get acquainted with this approach.

Presentation

“Can a manager motivate his employees? The concept of optimal motivation ”, Olga Prokhodskaya




Usually we talk about people motivated and unmotivated. But according to the concept of optimal motivation, which Olga talks about, one can identify as many as six motivational statuses. Of these, three are non-optimal motivation, the other three are optimal (it is obvious that it is better). Further, Olga talks about basic psychological needs - autonomy, belonging and competence - and their relationship with motivational statuses. She also tells how to use the right questions to check how satisfied these needs are, about how to switch to optimal motivation.

This report is not about ready-made recipes (“get a checklist on Wiki” or “use such a tool for one-on-one meetings”). For me, he was full of new theoretical information and therefore seemed valuable. It will be useful not only for those who work with the motivation of employees, but also for the analysis of their motivation and attitude to tasks. Recommend.

Presentation

“Remote team: how not to look at them on the screen, but to see everything”, Alexey Likhachev




Although the title of the report contains the words “remote team”, all of the above is relevant for working with the team in the office. Alex gives answers to questions: “How do I know if a developer works? Does he make bullshit? Is it developing? ”

One way to find out is to catch the digital footprint left by the developer (tasks in Jira and their movement by status, messages in Slack, activity by commits and code review, and others). True, the report did not make it clear how to track most of these parameters, except for the timlid to go to Jira, GitHub, etc. We do something similar, but with the ability to track the given parameters on one page (and everyone can see them, not only team lead).

The report also contains other useful information: about onboarding, collecting feedback, etc. But what else was interesting for me personally - the Evrone Challenge, a system of voluntary technical review.

Presentation

“The real tasks of the leader”, Ivan Lukyanov




Ivan's report is easy to read, without a “rocket science,” but there is something to think about.
There is a lot of uncertainty in the work of the leader, and the obvious solution is not always the right one, you need to dig deeper. One of the important tasks of a leader is to act as a link and correctly transfer information between a team and its leader (as well as stakeholders and other units).

It would seem that the idea is very simple. But it would be nice if we all recalled this more often and, as Ivan says, expanded the context of those around us. My team does not know something that I know, and I must tell them about it. My leader also does not know something that I know about the team and the project, and again, my task is to tell about it and make sure that they heard and understood me so that decisions were made correctly.

In addition, I took note of Team Health Check. In the report about it a little, but the approach is googled well.

Presentation

“Houston, we have a problem! Systemic risk management and control of 20+ teams ”, Andrey Ryzhkin




Andrei talks about the approach to risk management that he and his colleagues have implemented to reduce time shifts. The approach is quite simple and transparent:

  1. List the possible risks.
  2. Assess the likelihood of a trip and the level of consequences
  3. Based on this, calculate the importance and decide on how we will work with this risk.

Naturally, Andrei talks about all this in more detail, with examples and tips from his experience. I recommend this report to those who are faced with project management but are not yet working with risks.

Presentation

Papers from colleagues from Tinkoff


From Tinkoff two speakers participated in TeamLeadConf - Galina Golovanova and Anton Kosterin tohandr. I liked the reports of my colleagues, but I deliberately do not put them on the general list so that my attitude does not look biased. It is clear, after all, that I have a special interest in what is happening in our company.

“Universal competency map”, Galina Golovanova




Galina talks about a problem that is also very close to me: as a team grows, the manager knows less about employees and their competencies, and teams develop unevenly.

For Galina and her department, the solution was the matrix of competencies - the guys identified a set of important skills (hard skills) for them, described the levels and clear criteria for each of them. At the initial stage, they evaluated themselves and defended the grades in front of more experienced colleagues. And then once every six months certifications are carried out to support the matrix in the current state.

In the report, Galina tells the story of the implementation of this approach and how the competency matrix helps with rotation and makes posts more transparent for employees.
The report will be useful both to the team leaders of small teams, and to department heads - to everyone who is faced with growth planning, rotations, the need to fumble knowledge and questions like “Why is Vasya senior, and I not?”

Presentation

“I read on the fence:“ XYZ ””, Anton Kosterin




Surely, you have at least once heard from people of the older generation “Here in our time ...”, “Youth ...” or something like that. And if you often work with colleagues 10 years younger or older than you, then you yourself might notice that these colleagues are slightly different. They may seem to you more relaxed, less serious, more or less ambitious ...

In his report, Anton seeks an explanation for this phenomenon in the theory of generations: he tells what the essence of “archetypes” and “generations” is, gives the results of a study showing how one generation perceives something else and discusses how it affects work and motivation.

Of course, I had already heard about generations X, Y, Z, but I did not seriously think about how this theory is applicable in the work. The report is interesting in itself as a statement of interesting facts, but it will be especially useful for managers working with employees of different ages.

Special thanks to Anton for a large list of additional materials that will help you dive into the topic.

Presentation

Talk shows


I want to mention two more reports. They are not about tools and practices, not about theory and the introduction of a new approach in organizations. It is possible that they are more entertaining than informative. Nevertheless, it was very interesting to watch and listen to the speakers, the reports evoked the most lively response from all participants, and I definitely recommend watching them.

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This report develops the theme of fears familiar to many timlids, which Yegor raised in the article “How to Sit Timlid” . The story turned out to be very funny, and, of course, many myths turned out to be just myths. Spoiler: we are in demand in the market, our task is not to write code, and skills are not tied to a specific company.

It’s not that I had serious doubts about this, but it’s nice to know that not only you have such thoughts, to understand that everything’s ok with you, and calm down.

This is a great example of a top report compiled from my own impressions, creativity and data from two surveys. An occasion to think if you have long wanted to speak, but as if there was nothing to tell about. By the way, this is the best TeamLeadConf 2020 report on the results of the voting of participants.

Presentation

“My experience of conducting 1000 interviews”, Egor Bugaenko




Oh, this is a bomb report, the perfect ending to the first day! Egor spoke about the seven sins of the interviewer and shared his view on the correct recruitment process.

Many tips are controversial or of little use in our conditions. For example, instead of asking questions about hard skills, look at the candidate’s certificates, open source and pet projects. In my experience, most front-end candidates have none of this. I really appreciate when a candidate has a pet project, but I do not require its availability. However, Yegor is an incredibly charismatic speaker and will not leave anyone indifferent, and you can pull interesting ideas, even if you basically disagree with the report.

Here are some of my notes:

  • Certificates are still not worthless! :)
  • Open source, pet projects, participation in the life of the professional community are now more important than ever.
  • Yegor evaluates candidates on a 10-point scale; the overall assessment is made up of the assessment according to various criteria. We have interview reports, but without a numerical rating. It seems to be an interesting idea, you should try.

Presentation

Workshops


In addition to reports, four workshops were included in the conference program. Each participant could sign up for one of them, but the number of places was limited:

  • "Session of group deprocrastination" with Maxim Dorofeev.
  • “Solving problems with people according to schemes” with Alexander Orlov (and Vyacheslav Pankratov, but he did not come).
  • “The decision-making algorithm in teams” with Dmitry Lazarev.
  • “An informal leader” with Kirill Anastasin.

I will tell only about one of them. And although there is no and will not be a video of the workshop, similar workshops are easily found on YouTube with the keywords “constructive confrontation”.

“Solving problems with people according to schemes”, Alexander Orlov




It was assumed that this three-hour master class will be conducted by Alexander Orlov and Vyacheslav Pankratov, co-founders and managing partners of the Stratoplan School of Managers. The presenters themselves and the Stratoplan school are quite well-known, so it is not surprising that this was the first workshop on which the seats ended. Unfortunately, Vyacheslav Pankratov was unable to attend the conference, so Alexander Orlov “swelled” for two (as he put it).

The master class was called “Solving problems with people according to schemes,” but in fact it was devoted to the method of constructive confrontation. After the introductory information, the participants divided into triples and then performed tasks in these mini-groups.

After getting to know each other, it was necessary to solve two cases.

The first is to inform the subordinate that it is bad to be late for the day. However, at this stage, they had to cope with the case solely on the basis of their own knowledge and skills.

Then there was a parsing explaining the motivation, fears and plans of the employee. And after - the second case, in which it was necessary to explain to another employee that disruptions to colleagues obscene adversely affect the productivity of the team. Here it was already necessary to apply the method of constructive confrontation.

Throughout the entire master class, the theory was supplemented by examples from life that helped to make decisions in cases or made you think about situations from the practice of participants. Three hours passed quickly and added a lot of new thoughts. If you have not heard about constructive confrontation - look for a video, I recommend it to everyone.

Instead of output


In conclusion, I can say that I have heard enough useful ideas that are applicable in the work. And most importantly - received a boost of motivation to implement these ideas. So I highly recommend the TeamLeadConf conference for visiting. And I hope that my review will help you choose reports for further viewing.

And most importantly, we have already discussed what we heard with our leads and will continue to implement the best practices for each team.

PS: Records of all reports are available to participants, the top 10 reports on the results of voting are publicly available . Well, some topics, like constructive confrontation, google quite well.

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