What is a team leader in a software delivery team? How do you become one? We asked our Senior Technology Director, Egor Goryachkin. Egor has worked in IT since 1995. For the last 20 years in IT, Egor has changed positions from developer to project manager, from architect to delivery manager. Throughout the last ten years, he has been starting up dozens of software engineering teams for clients across the globe.
In this article, Egor shares tips on how to be successful in leading software delivery teams.
I started as a developer and went through a career change from team leader to architect to project manager to delivery manager. I helped to open representative offices for IT companies in Belarus, Poland, and Spain. Now, I live in Ukraine and manage the Forte Group delivery centers in Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland.
There has always been a need for leaders, even in such a demanding and highly qualified sphere as IT. The need to unite individuals into groups has always been one of the pillars of human civilization. These groups need leaders for survival, development, and victories.
A great example of this is the Project Oxygen experiment by Google. Google tried to prove that team leadership wasn’t necessary and got rid of the managers in some of their teams. But after a couple of months, those teams stopped performing. Thus, Google proved quite the opposite – that team management was essential.
The experiment showed that teams couldn’t work efficiently without leaders, even in the IT industry. As a result, Google formulated the top 10 behaviors of the best managers at Google. That subsequently helped to improve employee turnover and satisfaction rates within the company.
The team leader role is vital for all kinds of evolving engineering teams – developers, QA engineers, DevOps, and other groups who work in IT. Based on my experience, I believe that to be a successful manager and to perform the role efficiently, and a team leader should:
Back at the beginning of 2000, in Minsk, I felt the impact of being a great team leader. My team leader was Andrew F, and he provided positive feedback about my job without my explicit request (I was very humble back then). Andrew convinced our manager that I no longer required external management, either workflow or client communication. Moreover, he said I could manage a team by myself. He boosted my self-confidence and did a lot to help me believe in myself. I needed an external assessment back then, which helped me move to the team leader position.
I observed how people mature and become team leaders in the working process. It helped me to shape six essential qualities for an effective team leader.
The most significant and hard skill that a team leader needs is a willingness to help the team evolve. Every team member is individual and has their own experience, learning style, and potential to develop.
The “muscle” that I trained is a skill to work with colleagues from different cultures, beliefs, and countries who share the same values. It’s a pleasure to observe the outcomes my trainees can achieve. Even when they leave the team, they’re ready for something; it’s nice to see their success.
Once, I broke these rules and was punished for that. When I was younger, my team had to redesign the company website. I was completely autonomous and took the role of product owner, not taking into account the goals of redesign and business expectations. As a result, our prototype was rejected, and the work of the whole team for one and a half months was wasted. I learned my lesson!
Team leaders that I’ve come across during my career can be split into two categories:
In the earlier years (talking about the IT industry in the ex-USSR countries in East Europe), team leaders could grow only out of the second category. There were no methodologies, processes, or education programs. Now, the IT industry is a complex domain. To become a good team leader, you have to be ready for constant development.
People who become managers but don’t have a specific education cannot make it to their more educated colleagues. They can be proactive and initiative, but they lack culture and professional attitude. In the engineering environment, a well-educated professional is already an authority that’s why his team will be more productive.
It’s not age or gender that makes you a good team lead; personality and relevant knowledge matter. If you want to become a successful team lead, start evolving your business vision. Don’t forget to think in a business-like manner. We all work for companies to succeed, win the competition, and bring profit.
When you grow professionally from a software developer or quality assurance engineer to a manager, the company wants to trust your business decisions. We all should help our businesses to grow.
I hope that my thoughts and experience are helpful to you and that you’ll make the right choice about whether you are ready for such a challenge. Good luck!