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June 5 · Issue #147 · View online
Level Up delivers a curated newsletter for leaders in tech. A project by https://patkua.com. Ideal for busy people such as Tech Leads, Engineering Managers, VPs of Engineering, CTOs and more.
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Can you have more than one tech lead?
Last week I wrote my response to the phrase, “We don’t need a tech lead”. This week I want to look at the other end of the spectrum, a team with multiple technical leaders. Firstly, I think having a team with multiple technical leaders can work, but in practice, I don’t see the same team led by multiple technical leaders at the same time often.
Situation A: Imagine a team of 4 developers. Now imagine that there are 2-3 tech leads. Feel a bit unbalanced? Yes. One could describe it as being a bit “top-heavy”. What would each tech lead be doing? Why do you need so many formal leaders for a small team. In this situation, it’s much more common to have a single tech lead.
Situation B: Imagine a team of 8 developers. Depending on the complexity of the domain and application, this is where you might consider splitting the tech lead role, or put differently, multiple tech leads. A single tech lead might be overwhelmed by the complexity, especially if they are newer to the role and still learning and building their tech lead skills. Having two tech leads might help distribute the responsibility and give each person time to do their tech lead duties well. In the happy case, these two tech leads work well as a tech leadership team (or pair).
Situation C: Imagine the same team of 8 developers led by two tech leads. Now imagine the two tech leads fundamentally disagree with each other’s style of building software. What happens? You might notice frequent conflict, team members are provided with contrasting advice/feedback. Although this should be a single team, you often end up with team members gravitating towards the tech lead who they find most sympathetic, aligned with their own styles and you end up with two mini-teams who have to find ways to work with, or more frequently, work around each other. The result is more accidental complexity than required for the product they are building. A good analogy is to imagine a hydra where each head wants to go in a different direction 🫣. If you’re a manager who decides on team structures and staffing/team membership, you would be hoping for situations A or B, but also need to plan how to handle situation C. There are also often other practical reasons to have a single tech lead as it’s easier for other departments, and people from other teams to interact with a single point of contact instead of relaying context between several.
Only a few more seats for the publicly scheduled Engineering Manager Essentials (Management track) training. More dates will be planned after European summer (on sale in Jul). Until then, consider using the summer time to level up your skills with self-paced courses at the http://techlead.academy
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Multiple tech leads for the same team can be like a Hydra. This 6 headed hydra photo was taken by Dennis Jarvis (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ [email protected]/32865908492) and included here under the CC2.0 licence
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Check out the Svelte Origins documentary trailer! Premiering on June 21st, Svelte Origins tells the story of how and why Svelte came to be. Learn about the community and how it’s grown since its inception in 2016.
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Tim Cook: The 100 Most Influential People of 2022
Reading time: 1 with video 3:37 President of the EM Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs (@laurenepowell), writes a short blurb about why tech CEO, Tim Cook was added to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People which includes a short video
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From grad to VP: my journey to leading Skyscanner’s engineering teams globally
Reading time: 9mins The Skyscanner blog recently published a nice leadership journey where Andrew Phillips joined as a grad in 2009 and is currently VP of Engineering. Some nice lessons learned and insights in this leadership story.
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The ROI for manager training: Why it's your best defense against the great resignation
Reading time: 9mins Training can turn your managers into your best asset for creating a positive workplace culture, one that not only keeps your best people but draws in the next generation of top performers. Britt Andreatta, Ph.D. (@BrittAndreatta) helps you put a business case together about why it makes sense to invest in manager training, particularly relevant if you’re a Director+ role or in senior/executive management.
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Only a few tickets left for the June cohort. Click the banner to find out more
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Thin Platforms – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Reading time: 17mins Tech industry analyst, Ben Thompson (@benthompson) describes the rise of a very specific type of platform, the “thin platform.” Though it’s a relatively long read, he covers a good amount of history (useful for those newer to the industry) and the implications of the “thin platform” using examples from Microsoft, Stripe (and I’d include Shopify here too).
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Uber’s Unified Signup and Login Stack
Reading time: 16mins An interesting case study from Neville Mehta, Sachin Nambiar Nalavattanon, Gaurav Bansal, and David Wang at Uber, who share how they approach the complexity of a unified signup and login stack given many different product lines, regions, and acquisitions over time.
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Highlights From KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022
Reading time: 7mins
Ara Pulido (@arapulido) publishes a nice write up of the trends and topics covered at the recent 2022 European edition of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Some good themes and topics I have seen with many of my clients.
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Struggling with time? Take this self-guided course to find out different approaches that might work for you
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LGBTQ+ friendly tech companies: Google, Microsoft, IBM, Apple - Protocol
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Engineering Levels at Honeycomb: Avoiding the Scope Trap
Reading time: 7mins Engineering Leader Ben Darfler (@bdarfler) recently wrote an article about how they revisited their engineering levels, trying to avoid an excessive focus on scope. While this article doesn’t share their ladder, it talks about some of the considerations they had and hinted at some of the elements. YMMV.
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How We Test Microservices Locally at Nylas
Reading time: 11mins Many organisations struggle to test microservices. At what level, how much integration and how much end-to-end. Zhi Qu (@Zhi_Qu_) from Nylas shares how they approached this in their organisation including specific tools they use to provide testing environments to developers.
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Such great advice for leaders to manage boundaries 👇 (i.e. saying no!)
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More leaders need to encourage better documentation. Check out this approach in one team at Shopify 👇
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A great initiative at @ in @'s team: holding a "documentation day" where a team downs tools and brings their team and project docs up to date together.
✅A new @ site, architecture diagram, onboarding setup, README updates, divided and conquered.
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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