[brandall10]

I don't agree with it either.

Case in point - I've been in a situation as detailed toward the end of the article where all the devs on the team were feature leads, except we still had a designated overall lead. Just 4 devs on the team, all of us were very sr (principal or sr. principal devs). But the overall number of stakeholders in the product were probably well over 30 people, so it was still a big coordination effort.

It was for a fairly large legacy enterprise healthcare product ($200M per annum revenue). Each big feature had its own core team with other stakeholders in the company -- usually these meetings would be with a half dozen other people. The main core team for the overall product had about 20 members. Each feature had its own requirements/design documents (usually 30+ pages each). The main requirements/design docs would sorta be like a high-level index linking to these sub documents.

It was a waterfall process of course, and once the designs were mostly there the entire team would work on all the features together. The team lead would assign what people would be working on at any given time, but beyond that the feature leads would break down and delegate the overall work based on who was working on their feature. Typically each feature would be worked on by 2 people at a time and sometimes 3.

The team lead wasn't actually the strongest dev, he just had the best 'leadership skills'. He was the one our manager trusted most and generally spoke to about overall project health and deadlines. He was the one who cleared pathways with other teams/resources (ie. ensured QA was on target to line up an availability window, how many engineers they could provide, etc).

I don't see any points in the article that really argue against having a designated lead, and I think it's always a weird idea that a team lead (note I don't say 'tech' lead) is seen as anything but a manager who still codes. It's not an architect, the strongest dev, etc. It's a person with a best management/leadership skills with perhaps a solid high-level grasp of the domain. In a small team/product yes it can just be just the strongest dev, naturally rising up. But in these situations I've seen usually the key is there are not too many overall stakeholders... say a team of 2-3 devs with less than 10 people involved overall.

[mighty_warrior]

I agree with you. As a "tech lead" myself, I find my biggest jobs are fostering communication between team members and clearing roadblocks. Those roadblocks could be making a design decision, clearing up requirements, getting support from external teams, etc. When every team member is responsible for clearing their own obstacles you find a lot less work gets done and often times the same problem gets solved multiple times by multiple team members.

[matt_kantor]

That sounds like a project manager to me. I'm curious if you have anyone with that job title (and if so what they do) or if your "team lead" is acting as a de facto project manager to fill a void.

If you don't have a dedicated project manager (which I suspect is the case), I'm also curious if you think your team lead is overworked. Maybe your team doesn't need full-time project management so it's more efficient to have this person split their energy between that and engineering, or maybe not and you'd be better off having someone who can specialize in that role.

[brandall10]

Yes, there was a dedicated PM - she was essentially at the top of the food chain, running the steering committee meetings (both the core team and individual feature teams) and coordinating the effort with all the team leads/managers (hardware, software, QA, product release engineering, regulatory, source control management, requirements engineering, and technical documentation). As I stated, there some 30+ people involved in the project. So the team leads/managers would at times do PM-like activities, more or less working hand-in-hand with the PM to get things through the system, organized, scheduled, signed-off etc.

BTW, I imagine you're mostly keying off the comment "He was the one who cleared pathways with other teams/resources (ie. ensured QA was on target to line up an availability window, how many engineers they could provide, etc)." That isn't an entirely true statement -- the PM would be the one to get this set in stone and pull rank if needed, esp. working with PMs for other projects or upper management. But as a team lead myself on another (albeit smaller) project, for instance, I would constantly be moving around the company talking with the other leads/managers to do exploratory work on where people were at even before the core team kicked off, building bridges so to speak. And between the core team meetings the unexpected would happen. Sometimes that would be a discussion with other leads, sometimes it would make more sense to bring it up with the PM, but generally speaking her plate was pretty full so I would take as much off of it as I could.

The team lead wasn't in particular overworked, he just spent the majority of his time in management type activities, perhaps about 1/3 of his time actually designing/coding/creating documentation.

[foota]

my former workplace would call this a scrum master (of course we were doing scrum not waterfall) perhaps dam engineer for waterfall?