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Tech Lead Management roles are a trap
#17 – December 28, 2020
this week's favorite
The tech lead manager role is often presented as an easy on-ramp to team manager, but my experience is that being a tech lead manager is a considerably harder first management role than pure team management. Rather than an on-ramp, tech lead manager roles are usually a trap for first-time managers.
This post is a reflection on being part of making a maturing infrastructure organization for nearly five years.
I know the policy doesn't really exist anymore, but I still like the idea a lot in principle (for large and financially secure startups, say 1k developers and up). Just wondering what Xooglers and others think about it.
One of the downsides of being a group manager is that you spend most of your time on change management, but it must be said that organizational change management is a pretty interesting topic, particularly within a fast growing company.
A popular goal-setting framework, Objectives and key results (or OKRs) are an effective method for planning and measuring success on a team level. They fall short, however, when companies attempt to apply them to individual contributors. Setting individual OKRs generally leads to goals that are either not true indications of meaningful progress or that are easily gameable. Instead, individual contributors should be assessed based on the extent to which their work contributes to team goals that add real value to the company and its customers.