Does Your Project Need a Team Leader?

If you want to develop your product, but your company does not yet have the necessary knowledge or resources, most likely you have already thought about outsourcing the product development. If so, this article will be very useful for you. Today we will talk about a figure that plays an extremely important role in remote teams, i.e. the team leader. What is his place in the project and is there a need to add such a specialist to your remote team? All the answers are in this article.

A team leader is the leader of a development team. Like any leader in various fields, the team leader mainly performs managerial functions and is an important link between a customer and a team. Moreover, the more complex the business task is, the greater the importance of the team leader is.

However, not everything is limited to managerial responsibilities. Despite the fact that the team leader himself is engaged in the technical development of the project and its architecture just partially, he should clearly know and understand what is happening with the project, at what stage of development it is and reasonably accept or reject proposals and ideas of developers.

Team Lead skills

Team leaders’ technical competence includes:

• transformation of a business task into a technical task that is understandable to developers;
• responsibility for the quality and technology of the project;
• writing code reviews;
• development, testing and design of the project;
• understanding the nature of emerging issues, their recognition and solution.

Of course, upon a thorough consideration of this position, it may seem, the team leader performs different functions in different companies. In some companies, they are only expected to move tasks around the board, in other companies they have to hire and fire employees, and somewhere else, they may be told to design the architecture, set business goals and think about the pains of product end-users simultaneously. There are differences not only between different companies, but also even within different teams located in the same office.

Team Lead responsibilities

The general list of team leader’s responsibilities includes:

• participation in writing technical documentation;
• selection of the most suitable technology for the project;
• participation in the team building process;
• architecture development;
• writing code review;
• bringing common ideas to each team member;
• the choice of performer for each specific task;
• optimization of the development process;
• uploading changes to the server;
• ensuring professional development, the exchange of experience between team members in order to increase their interchangeability;
• regular meetings within the team;
• reporting to clients on the status of the project development and existing issues;
• control of project compliance with technical requirements;
• support and evaluation of team’s interesting initiatives and suggestions.

In our company, we try to stick to the list of generally accepted responsibilities, although everything often depends on the specifics of the project. Nevertheless, no matter what functions the team leader performs, the main goal is always the same, i.e. to ensure timely and high-quality fulfillment of the task.

Team Lead characteristics

Such specialist usually has the following personal traits:

• responsibility;
• analytical mindset;
• hardworking;
• punctuality;
• diplomacy;
• initiative;
• the ability to find simple ways to solve complex problems;
• general technical literacy;
• focus on results;
• ability to make quick decisions.

In which situations you may need a team lead?

Potential clients often ask who will manage the development process. Everything here is also not so simple. Most often, it all depends on the specifics of the project, the situation that made the customer ask for the service, and the chosen model of cooperation.

Let us say the client needs to develop a turnkey product, but he is not a technical expert, or simply does not want to spend a lot of time monitoring the work on the project, then the team leader or project manager in such situation is simply necessary.

However, things can go different ways. Let us imagine a large company that is developing a large enterprise project, which consists of many modules. At some point, the company’s specialists realize the lack of resources or some competence. In addition, they begin to hire remote teams. They hire one for one module and the second for the other and so on. The project is expanding and the product owner can no longer coordinate the work of each team alone. In such cases, there may be a need of hiring a team leader for each team and interacting only with a group of team leaders, each of whom will be responsible for his team.

Situations may vary. The most important thing the client should understand is that the presence of the team leader on the side of the developer gives him the opportunity to “unload”, i.e. save time on solving many technical and organizational issues. Such a specialist will certainly possess all the technical skills necessary for implementing the idea and the experience in managing projects similar specifics wise, what guarantees timely delivery of a high-quality product that best meets the needs of your business.