Tech Lead

In Need of Extra Hands: Hiring Independent Contractors and External Vendors

When needing to hire additional capacity or expertise, it is important to secure the hiring budget, identify contractors or vendors, vet their quality, and be prepared on the logistical, product, and engineering side. Contracting is a good opportunity to make the right hire and it is important to ensure that the regular team knows and understands what the contractors are building.

Developing Your Personal Brand: A Brief Guide to Creating an Elevator Pitch

This article discusses the importance of having an elevator pitch to present yourself in a professional setting. It provides advice on how to create a two-minute pitch that includes ten things you are good at and proud of, and how to turn those into stories. It also suggests asking friends and colleagues to help identify your strengths, and to practice the pitch to make it sound natural. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of having a consistent message about yourself across all platforms.

How to Establish Yourself as a Leader

This article is about a woman's journey to becoming a tech lead and tech lead manager. She learned that self-leadership is more than just having a title, and that she could start leading without waiting for a title. She also learned that age doesn't matter when it comes to leadership, and that she should quiet her inner critic and fear in order to pursue her passion for leadership.

Restructuring a Team: How to Enhance Accountability and Ownership

When the author joined their current company, they found that the team was not structured to execute and scale well due to its size and project-based nature. To address this, the author and their team restructured the team into six smaller subteams with vertical ownership and tech leads to drive a charter and provide a long-term vision. This improved the team's engagement, on-call rotation, and overall reliability. The restructuring also allowed leadership to have more visibility into areas that needed more investment. However, the author also learned that forming a research team too early can be problematic if the underlying platform is not mature enough.

Growing With An Organization

This article discusses the difficulty of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager. It explains that as a company grows, roles and responsibilities need to change and be delegated in order for the company to be successful. The article emphasizes the importance of recognizing why different roles are important and being willing to let go of certain roles and responsibilities as the company grows.

Helping Your Reports Become Managers

At Niche, the author had the privilege of growing a department from two people to over a dozen. To enable further growth, the author needed to foster and develop a new layer of management within the team. To do this, the author set a six-month plan for the most senior member of the QA team to become a manager. Through a SWOT analysis, reading curriculum, and mentorship sessions, the author was able to equip the emerging manager with the skills and confidence to become a successful manager. The author learned that having a longer preparation time was helpful in changing the emerging manager's perception within their team and that nurturing talent internally is a sound business decision.