Management
Team Lead
Traits
- Manages a team of 2-4 developers.
- Coaches their team and keeps them motivated.
- Helps manage projects by:
- Building out sprint plans.
- Writing up articulate and properly detailed tickets.
- Delegates tasks, not just distributing tickets.
- Great communicator, both in writing and verbally.
Due to the nature of our work, this is more of a “player-coach” role. They will have supervisory privileges over a few people but will still be fairly billable on projects, though more in a project management sense rather than strictly coding.
Day to Day Examples
A Team Lead will be having 1:1s weekly with their direct reports, in which they’ll discuss performance, goals, company info, etc.
Write up tickets in the tracking system and assign them.
Manager
Traits
- Capable of managing a single large team of developers, or multiple smaller ones. As we grow, may manage Team Leads as well.
- Map out career plans for each of your team members and help them achieve their goals.
- Understands the strengths and weaknesses of their team and can coax the most value of those.
- Can jump into sales calls and support the team on those.
- Views projects not just at a technical level, but also from a personnel point of view too.
- Strong understanding of software development practices and knows how and when to deploy those tools appropriately.
- Has an understanding of product development and how to ship.
Day to Day Examples
Managers attend a lot of meetings. These will be a mix of management-type meetings, planning, strategy, and collaboration with other departments.
Managers can run the development side of project management with aplomb. They’ll work closely with other teams (namely PMs and Designers) to make sure sprints run smoothly.
Director
Traits
- Manages managers. Directors may manage very senior Individual Contributors as well.
- A magnet for recruiting and knows how to reach out and bring talented developers onboard.
- Has a presence in the developer community.
- Consistently demonstrates the initiative to make the whole team better through improving people, processes, and tools.
- Still has a strong technical background that can be used to help in sales, requirements gathering, and helping architect complex solutions.