As you grow in your career, chances are that one day you will end up as the Technical Lead of 1 or more projects. Often not by choice. The role of Technical Lead is quite different from the role of (senior) Software Developer and this talk will bring you answers on questions like: • How do I do technical interviews? • How do I lead a team? How do I lead multiple teams? • How do I cope with my new responsibilities? • How do I cope with success / failure? • How do I prevent losing focus on the technical challenges? In summary, everything you want(ed) to know on your first day as a Technical Lead and that you can use every day from that point onwards.

1. 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

2. ORDINAJWORKS
Bart Blommaerts
Application Architect
Ordina Belgium
@DaggieBe
JWorks

3. Technical Leadership
What?

4. Technical Leadership
What?
Technical Guidance

5. Technical Leadership
What?
Risks & RequirementsTechnical Guidance

6. Technical Leadership
What?
CoachingRisks & RequirementsTechnical Guidance

7. Technical Leadership
What?
CommunicationCoachingRisks & RequirementsTechnical Guidance

8. Technical Leadership
Do we really need one?

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

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

12. 2 sides to a story
Technical responsibilities vs. Leadership activities
Technical Leadership
50 %

13. MIZABusiness Company
Technical

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1. Advocate for Change

15. ORIENT
ACT
OBSERVE
DECIDE
Advocate for Change

16. Experience the same pain as
everybody else on the team

17. 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

18. MIZABusiness Company
2. Work through Failure and Success

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

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Celebrate success
Sprint celebrations
Feature complete
Congratulate the team
Congratulate individuals

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3. Stay Technical

22. Stay Technical
Write code
Review code
Technical vision
Evolution of code

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4. Always Available

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

25. Be realistic

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5. Be a mentor for your team

27. Mentor
Mediator

28. Mentor
Mediator

29. Mentor Match goals
Optimise for
the group
Effective
delegation
Mediator

30. Mentor Match goals
Optimise for
the group
Effective
delegation
Mediator

31. Mentor Match goals
Optimise for
the group
Effective
delegation
Mediator

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

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6. Surround yourself with other Tech Leads

34. Personal Level

35. Objectives
Architecture
Interoperability
Dependencies
Organisational level

36. You are not alone

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Leadership

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7. Interviewing potential new team members

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Know your goal
Prepare
Usefulness of resumes
Don’t focus on tooling
Mindset of a Developer
Eagerness to learn

40. Do not use stackoverflow
to find questions

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

42. MIZABusiness Company
8. Embrace Cultural differences

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

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

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9. Estimating is hard

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

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

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

49. 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

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

53. No

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11. Facilitate (agile) team work

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

56. Facilitate an awesome team

57. MIZABusiness Company
Thank You
@DaggieBe