Notes on Technical Leadership and Problem Solving

Recently I had a deep dive conversation into what the role of a technical leader should be and wanted to share a few points here.

There are lot of aspects to consider here

Setting Platform roadmap and vision

Before we can set a roadmap and a vision for where the platform should be heading, it’s important to first understand it in-depth. Once you have that level of detailed knowledge about the current system, changes and roadmap can be proposed with a level of certainty in mind.

A technology leader’s main goal is to have a constant radar scanning for opportunities and gaps in the system, and propose better alternatives, refactoring, rewrites or even rebuilding the architecture.

Vision is about how all this is going to pan out in the next 5-10 years. If you can get that right, you are the best leader your team can hope for.

Encouraging (enforcing) best practices

Over time, these three things grow beyond a certain level of control - workforce, codebase and business expansion. All these pose unique challenges, but a common one they all throw at leaders, is the problem if best practices and how to ensure they aren’t left out on a daily basis.

If quality, integrity and cost of ownership is taken into consideration, making sure best practices are followed/introduced/revisited etc, is of paramount importance to ensure the health of both your tech stack and your organization. The benefits of this are incomparable if you start listing them down in detail.

Technical Debt

As your code base grows, debt always inevitably piles up, as we make compromises due to urgency of business, lack of stringent reviews for changes and the speed at which we want to deliver in the market today.

The leaders’ role here is to ensure that debt is not forgotten and take ownership of ensuring it is cleared on a regular basis as part of upcoming changes. There are multiple approaches to this, but I prefer doing it incrementally along with upcoming changes, rather than a big bang hackathon to clear technical debt - that wont bring about any systemic changes for long term.

Innovation

Pushing team and oneself towards technical excellence involves keeping an eye out for all opportunities for innovation. Using all avenues possible to push for minor to major innovations helps the leader and their team build their own career paths while also helping their company on their innovation path. It’s a true win-win.

Being visible and hands-on

The last but probably the most important item in my opinion, is to be a visible and hands-on leader. A leader has to spend long hours to truly understand about their people, their product, and always be connected to the ground level operations. Losing touch with what your team works on on a daily basis, is like shutting off the gates to learning and development for themselves and the team.

Failing to be hands-on and being available and visible to team and stakeholders, opens up a huge can of worms - lack of trust and respect, lack of knowledge, unable to review team performance and unable to establish an overall growth trajectory for the team. The list goes on.

Conclusion

This is not a complete list, but these are thoughts which got triggered due to a conversation I had and helped me atleast organize these most important categories and start working on them for myself and also for leaders inside my team.