Preface
In the past year, my work focus has gradually shifted from front-line developers to technical managers. During this year, I deeply felt the difference between executors and managers. In the process, many changes are required to adapt to this role.
Below I will use my personal experience and understanding to summarize how the front-end team leader should manage the team. I hope it can give some reference and help to those who have just moved from developers to management.
I think to manage the front-end team well:
Essentially: Let the team avoid detours and lead the team on the right path.
Concept: Let the team work efficiently and happily.
Implementation: Try every means to empower the team and members.
Mainly analyzed from the following dimensions:
1. Personal perspective
Role change, developer -> technical manager
Need to be responsible for the team's output results and the growth of team members.
From developers to technical managers, the work content is no longer just implementation of development. Helping team members grow, discovering team problems, and correcting the team's direction are the core tasks of technical managers and the most important change. It’s a change in thinking.
As a developer, I care about code logic and details, be strict with the code, and be responsible for the results. This is a very excellent quality.
But when you switch to a technical manager, the real technical development work is only a small part of your job, because no matter how excellent your technical ability is, you cannot complete everything. On the contrary, you have more and more important things to do. Finish. When you focus on the details of code and logic, it is easy to fall into a dead end of thinking and lose control of the overall situation.
Change of focus, rely on oneself -> rely on others
From developer -> technical manager, I don’t think there has been much change in terms of form. We still need to pay attention to technology and write code frequently. But the focus has changed. In the past, you had to rely on your own lines of code to reflect your value. Instead, you need to transform your own abilities into others' abilities and complete the core things through a team. If you still rely on yourself for everything and do everything yourself, that will definitely be the case. No way. If you encounter team problems that can be solved through communication, be sure not to do it yourself. If you do it yourself, the team will not grow. Spend more time cultivating people and growing the team.
When you are an individual contributor, your capabilities are as follows:
When you are a manager, your ability requirements have completely changed:
Maintain self-growth and improve comprehensive capabilities
As a front-end team leader, you must improve your abilities in all aspects to be qualified for such a role, mainly focusing on the following aspects:
Technical ability: This is the foundation of technical managers, and they must continue to improve. If your skills are not as good as others, you will not be able to convince the public.
Business capabilities: Only by having a correct understanding of the business and understanding the essential needs of the business can technology realize value.
Planning ability: Technical managers need to clarify team goals and be result-oriented to make reasonable plans, such as:
Technical system planning: project technology selection, technical document preparation, etc.
Task planning: assign different developers according to task difficulty, task timing, etc.
Personnel arrangement planning: According to the actual situation and characteristics of team members, arrange appropriate things for the right people to do, so as to maximize the interests of the team.
Communication and collaboration skills: Technical managers not only need to communicate and collaborate within the project team, but may also need to communicate and collaborate across groups or even departments. Technical managers need to convey superior strategies, tactics and tasks. They not only need to communicate clearly with developers what they need, but also Communicate clearly why you are doing this.
Judgment ability: Technical managers need to have overall control of the project and have the confidence to make judgments and decisions on matters within the project. like:
Risk judgment: There are problems with the business implementation direction, task scheduling has exceeded, etc.
Decision-making judgment: What should be done during a certain period of time, what should not be done, etc.
Technical judgment: implementation cost, implementation direction, specific implementation judgment based on business review, etc.
Leadership: Technical managers need to be responsible and responsible. If the team has problems, it will inevitably reflect problems on the team leader.
Architectural capabilities: Managing system complexity is the most pragmatic.
Strictly demand yourself and lead by example
As a team leader, you must correctly convey values, lead by example, and be a good role model. The status of a team can often be seen intuitively from the status of the team leader.
2. Team perspective
1. Establish a good team atmosphere and sense of value
good team atmosphere
Encourage knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, and technology precipitation, which can promote the personal growth and business development capabilities of team members.
Strengthening team communication and cooperation can include regular review meetings, code review meetings, discussions on technical issues, and improve the communication atmosphere of the team.
To create an atmosphere of learning and progress, you can provide some learning knowledge and share it from top to bottom (tell everyone what is advanced and popular, and broaden your horizons).
Periodic one-on-one communication and coaching. As a technical manager, it is very important to serve other members of the team, understand their demands, analyze their staged problems, understand their career plans, and help them solve and implement them, so periodic one-on-one meetings Communication is necessary. Feedback the problems you see among members in a timely manner and provide guidance and suggestions is very beneficial to the growth of team members.
Enhance team members’ sense of personal worth
Organize and guide team members to do technology sharing, technology pre-research, and new technology learning, etc., so that team members have opportunities to show themselves.
Encourage team members to share their results and give reasonable evaluations so that team members feel that their work results are noticed and valuable.
Allow members to participate in discussions and decisions, and appropriately affirm and express expectations to group members, so that group members have more motivation and a sense of self-worth.
2. Team infrastructure construction
Goal: Improve team efficiency, significantly enhance standardization, increase code reuse rate, enhance project stability, etc.
Essence: Better solve business problems, help the business live better in the future, and refuse to do things that are divorced from the actual business.
Key points: efficiency improvement, experience, stability.
It can be improved from development specifications, R&D processes, basic assets, engineering management, performance optimization, safety monitoring, quality assurance, etc. Based on this goal, we can:
Implement the front-end development specifications established within the company, discover areas that are currently lacking, and implement and promote them after confirming that they are feasible.
Specifications & Documentation: Specifications mean standards and are the consensus of the entire team. Documents can be used to record the team's technical accumulation and achieve the purpose of information sharing.
Improve the front-end monitoring and alarm system to maintain the stable operation of the project online and make it easy to track any problems.
Code review, discover and solve potential problems, lead team members to overcome difficulties and continuously control code quality.
Logic or components that can be abstracted and reused can be extracted as the team's basic assets and shared so that other project teams in the company can use them.
.... There are many more similar ones, so I won’t list them all here.
3. Reasonable personnel allocation
Simply put, the so-called employment strategy is: how to define people's roles, how to arrange affairs, how to arrange comprehensive plans for resources, and try to maximize the potential and value of each person.
We can determine which category a member belongs to through face-to-face communication, personal understanding, observing the way they handle things, their actual performance in past projects, etc.
| category | definition |
|---|---|
| excellent engineer | Excellent technology, identify with company goals, have strong self-motivation, like to discover and solve problems |
| Potential programmers with a certain degree of engineering thinking | Identifies the company's goals, has strong self-motivation, and technology is still in a period of rapid growth. |
| Ordinary programmers with a certain engineering mindset | Identify with the company's goals, have strong self-motivation, and have average technical potential |
| skilled programmer | The technology is relatively solid, but there is not much engineering thinking |
| Ordinary programmer | The technology is average and I don’t have much engineering thinking. |
Different membership categories are managed using different strategies
| category | preventive solution |
|---|---|
| excellent engineer | Let him take on more responsibilities, be responsible for more things (such as being responsible for a large piece of technical architecture), and provide more resources. |
| Potential programmers with a certain degree of engineering thinking | Provide more professional guidance and participate in key projects on a larger stage, meet strict technical requirements, start with code details, and provide more resources. |
| Ordinary programmers with a certain engineering mindset | Let them be responsible for some work that is not technically difficult but requires very rigorous and serious work, provide certain guidance, do not put too much pressure, and let them grow slowly. |
| skilled programmer | To improve his way of thinking (non-technical), he needs to carefully consider his potential and value ratio. Before his way of thinking is improved, he may only be able to do some relatively independent work that does not require high teamwork. They can be asked to provide technical guidance to new employees, but not in terms of thinking. |
| Ordinary programmer | Maintain the status quo without tilting resources. |
4. Create greater value
Write projects from a business perspective, give full play to the value of the project and discover expansion directions.
Lead team members well, discover their strengths and potentials, and leverage their strengths.
Summarize
The front-end team leader is a very critical position. This position requires a lot of thinking. The above are some summaries I have made based on my existing knowledge and experience. There are still many deficiencies that need to be explored through continuous learning and practice. come out.
Author: A young man who loves bugs
Link: https://juejin.cn/post/7230026709482766373