JWORKSPowered By Ordina
Everything you want(ed) to know on your
first day as a Technical Lead and that you
can use every day from this point
onwards.
10 tips to become an awesome Technical Lead
Bart Blommaerts

ORDINAJWORKS
Bart Blommaerts
Application Architect
Ordina Belgium
@DaggieBe
JWorks

Technical Leadership
What?

Technical Leadership
What?
Technical Guidance

Technical Leadership
What?
Risks & RequirementsTechnical Guidance

Technical Leadership
What?
CoachingRisks & RequirementsTechnical Guidance

Technical Leadership
What?
CommunicationCoachingRisks & RequirementsTechnical Guidance

Technical Leadership
Do we really need one?

Technical Leadership
Do we really need one?
Everything is awesome !

Technical Leadership
Do we really need one?
Really well-functioning teams
where people share responsibilities

2 sides to a story
Technical responsibilities vs. Leadership activities
Technical Leadership
50 %

MIZABusiness Company
Technical

MIZABusiness Company
1. Advocate for Change

ORIENT
ACT
OBSERVE
DECIDE
Advocate for Change

Experience the same pain as
everybody else on the team

JWORKSPowered By Ordina
Everything you want(ed) to know on your
first day as a Technical Lead and that you
can use every day from this point
onwards.
tips to become an awesome Technical Lead
Bart Blommaerts
11

MIZABusiness Company
2. Work through Failure and Success

Things will fail
Prepare for failure
Don’t finger-point
Take responsibility
Learn from failure

www.websitename.com 20
Celebrate success
Sprint celebrations
Feature complete
Congratulate the team
Congratulate individuals

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3. Stay Technical

Stay Technical
Write code
Review code
Technical vision
Evolution of code

Networking
Security
Deployment
Consistency
Stay Technical

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4. Always Available

Technical Design Business Project
Management
Code
Time Management
35% 25% 15% 25%

Be realistic

MIZABusiness Company
5. Be a mentor for your team

Mentor
Mediator

Mentor
Mediator

Mentor Match goals
Optimise for
the group
Effective
delegation
Mediator

Mentor Match goals
Optimise for
the group
Effective
delegation
Mediator

Mentor Match goals
Optimise for
the group
Effective
delegation
Mediator

Know when to give input
Know when to make decisions
Know when to step back

MIZABusiness Company
6. Surround yourself with other Tech Leads

Personal Level

Objectives
Architecture
Interoperability
Dependencies
Organisational level

You are not alone

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Leadership

MIZABusiness Company
7. Interviewing potential new team members

www.websitename.com 41
Know your goal
Prepare
Usefulness of resumes
Don’t focus on tooling
Mindset of a Developer
Eagerness to learn

Do not use stackoverflow
to find questions

1. Comfort
2. Offer options
3. Build on responses
4. Show interest
5. Bonus question

MIZABusiness Company
8. Embrace Cultural differences

Embrace Cultural
Differences
Diversity is invaluable
Opinions matter
Shared end goal
Surround yourself

Time
Communication
Prepare work
Everybody is part of the
team
Offshore?

MIZABusiness Company
9. Estimating is hard

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes
longer than you expect, even when you
take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Douglas Hofstadter

Quickly repurpose top innovation
before global communities.
Planning poker
Define a sequence
Set a baseline
Allow reasoning
Uncertainty is normal

(O + 4BG + P) ÷ 6
Unknown unknowns
Add 20% for
- test
- debug
- polish
- documentation
- wtf moments
Solutioning

Any estimate is better than no estimate
Don’t forget the bigger picture
Share estimates
Review estimates

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10. Interfacing with the outside world

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Communication with
non-technical people

Go-to-Guy / Go-to-Girl
for management, the customer and other stakeholders

No

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11. Facilitate (agile) team work

Facilitate agile
Backlog
Prioritised backlog
Sprint Planning
Burn down charts
Retrospectives
…

Facilitate an awesome team

MIZABusiness Company
Thank You
@DaggieBe