The Most Important Week Of My Team Lead Career
I have always been very confident in my abilities as a programmer. I’ve found it important to have strong belief in your skills. It allowed me the confidence to go from junior Android developer to leading a team of developers in just a few years.
Starting at my current job, I was the only full time Android developer. There was an intern who was there for my first 2 months but after he left I was on my own. Some of you might be thinking that this would be the best, and it’s hard to deny there weren’t benefits. I never had to deal with merge conflicts, it wasn’t a concern if I forgot to branch off, and most importantly, every decision that went into the applications was mine.
When designing our newest application I had made every architecture and library decision on my own. I sought out advice from my company and gave a lunch and learn talk over the new plans I had made, but this ended up not being as helpful as I hoped. It’s just hard to explain concepts in Android development to mostly Ruby developers in an hour over lunch. This was the best I had though and I went in thinking my design decisions were as good as they could be.
Fast forward two years and add three developers to my team and those decisions that went unquestioned now are causing issues as we scale. It took a few releases and a bit of tech debt but finally I had learned my lesson:
It was time to admit that I might not have all the answers.
Asking for advice was hard for me, as it is for I assume many developers, but I knew that it was key for self growth, as well as improving my team and the product.
So I sat down, and with a little help from my friend Taylor, came up with a plan.
#ArchWeek
Architecture Week was an idea I had about spending a week of meetings discussing everything that I thought I had done wrong and figuring out solutions.
It was key in #ArchWeek that my team felt comfortable telling me I was wrong. Throughout my time as a team lead I often had to remind my team that it was okay to correct me. Here was a whole new ballpark where I was asking them to judge and fine-tune something that I had written every line of for many months of my life. That’s where good old TSwift comes in.
I sent out that fake tweet to my team as our announcement in slack. Following that came a series of event with titles playing of Taylor Swift songs (“Begin Again” for our opening meeting, “Style” to discuss how to clean up some code, etc). It was playful, made my team more relaxed, and set the tone of what I wanted in these meetings.
So how’d it go?
I don’t want to speak for my team but as I put in the title, I don’t think there has been a more important week in my career.
Despite the laid back spirit of the invites we had some critical discussions to the future of our application’s code base. Everything had been discussed from database work, networking, views, to how we structure our packages.
The talks gave the freedom for both the team’s senior and the two junior developers on the team to give their opinions on what they had seen in their year or so in the code base.
We often shared articles in our slack channel of new talks and development ideas but we had a wide array of ideas of what and how to actually incorporate in our apps.
Out of all of this came a large list of action items. In just the couple months since, we’ve had proof of concepts of these improvements developed and even some have made it into our application. We still have a large list but can already see the improvements in our application and the development life cycle.
#ArchWeek taught me a lot beyond just what we discussed in our meetings. It taught me how to put more trust in my team and get more out of their input. It taught me how to provide a good environment for my team to feel comfortable to provide that input. And it gave me a good way to help show my team that I value their opinions and has brought us closer as a development squad.
This new level of communication has been beyond helpful since the end of architecture week. Opening up a line where the team knows they can push back and contribute more has led to more improvements in the application and more suggestions to add to our action items for improvement.
I know everyone’s looking forward to #ArchWeek2.
