Talk in English - UK at Dutch PHP Conference 2019
Short URL: https://joind.in/talk/46469
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The presentation "Becoming a tech lead - Lessons learned" will talk about my journey as I went from being an individual contributor to a tech lead position. This talk will cover various aspects of being a technical leader such as challenges of working on multiple fronts, acting as a requirement translator between product managers and developers, shifting a mindset, and providing learning opportunity while balancing pace and progress.
As a technical platform, Dutch PHP conference will be welcoming both individual contributors and team leads and I would like to present this talk to people from both the categories. Since tech leads and sprints are part of most of the engineering teams, my talk will benefit majority of the audience.
There were few things I missed during early stage of my transition, but experience and time spent with senior team members helped me to become better tech lead. Nowadays, a technology moves fast and so do people's roles. Hopefully the lessons I learned will act as a guide for attendees if they are planning to follow along the same path.
Often tech leads focus on productivity in terms of tickets completed. But it's often forgotten the human element attached to it as well. How do we make sure people are learning? Are they motivated enough to do the job? How do we balance priorities in a big flurry of incoming ticket? How can a tech leader be a bridge between technical and non-technical sides? This talk will try to present answers to these questions along with real-world scenarios that our team went through.
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As someone who takes the role of mentoring it was good to see some things are dealt with very similar.
Some minor critism, the story was very much based on own experiences which is not wrong at all. However a lot of companies have adopted another form of agile working. For example the company I work for has ditched using sprints in favor of a Kanban style. Sometimes telling about the scrum way feels less relatable. This while a lot that gas been told can still be applied to other forms of Agile and even waterfall.
If told in a way of how some tips can be adopted in stead of how did you do it, it would feel more telatable.
Also one thing that helped me when getting a bit more of an active role on mentoring, removing blockers and improving processes, use the moments that are present within the agile world. Use the standups, retrospective and refinements to steer, coach and bring news.
Keep up the good work.
The content of the talk was intresting. A lot of feedback across a journey that is not so obvious. But the form to speak about was a bit too "scholar", adding a bit of fun or more in a story game, would help this talk to be far more intresting!
Maybe my expectations were wrong about this talk, but I expected to see more of your experiences with leading people and trying to keep stakeholders happy while keeping the team healthy. Talk was more about how agile/scrum should work and ceremonies, from my point of view.
Really enjoyed this talk, and hearing about the speaker's experience moving from an individual contributor to a tech lead. I particularly liked the emphasis on communication, especially when working with multiple stakeholders. The speaker also did a great job of giving concrete examples of how the abstract concepts were applied in his own experiences. Thanks!
I liked the point you made about communication. It's often an underestimated topic in our job.
But I would have like to hear even more about your real own experience, and mostly your failures, and all the things you would have done differently now that you have done this journey.
However, the structure was pretty clear, as well as the description of the progression from individual contributor to tech leader.
I was not expecting a talk about being a scrum master. I would have liked more information about the time management of a tech lead (how do you make sure you still get some coding done) and how to help your team using soft skills when a problem occurs.
Maybe also try to slow down your speech as the pace was difficult to follow for me (and the speech to text service)
The talk was mentioning a lot of scrum stuff. It was like the Jayesh was expecting that everyone uses scrum and knows what it is. You should mention that it was empashized to scrum. And most of the things you told were theoretical. You should give more real practical examples where a team lead struggles with. For example: Developers doing things wrong, breaking live environments. How do you act then as a team lead. Do you blame them? Do you help them? Some developers have really problems of talking to others and functioning in a team. How do you help them? How do you make them part of it. etc etc.
I was genuinely curious to hear the various problems a tech lead might come across, and see the speaker's personal take on that, but the delivery was a bit different from that.
I also didn't like that the talk put more effort to scrum methodologies, which I don't think everyone follows in their work place.
This talk had some ok points, but halfway through I found myself disengaged as the talk had been reduced to 'scrum if only the tech lead participates' in my mind. I would have liked to see some more focus on managing concrete human issues.
There where some nice points to thinks about, but I found it difficult to follow.
And I didn't had the feeling that the most was about a tech lead but more about a general manager.
(Watched this on youtube)
I felt this was more about being a scrum master instead of being a tech lead. At least in my experience, all the items discussed are things done by our scrum master with the exception of the mentoring.
Besides that, I think it is useful information in a scrum setting. So this has potential but then I would slightly change some slides to focus more on the scrum than on the Tech lead role :)