Tech Lead Talks by CELUS: make your team stand out

A technical leader is a key position in the team. However, when a developer becomes the technical leader, it requires certain leadership skills to meet the team’s expectations. In June 2021, CELUS has launched a series of workshops to prepare newly minted leaders for future challenges. Now is the time to share the insights we got.

How can we develop effective technical leadership?

During the Tech Lead Track (TLT) program, CELUS’ tech leads had internal workshops with the CEO, Head of R&D and Head of HR and an online workshop “Shortcut to Tech Leadership” by Patrick Kua, Advisory Board Member at TIER Mobility. This experience gave the newly appointed tech leads knowledge in areas ranging from project management, technical vision, main principles of effective technical leadership to mentoring. Another workshop was devoted to "Effective communication: how to lead, support and develop your tech team" and conducted remotely by a Ukrainian IT expert - Oleks Maistrenko. Successful leaders need emotional intelligence, active listening skills, and the ability to build trust within a team to communicate well. According to Oleks, managing a team is, first and foremost, communication in a trusted environment. This is what allows your team to achieve its goals.

What to focus on

However, developing leadership skills is only one side of the coin. Our tech leaders took part in the Tech Lead Talks event, where guest speakers shared their thoughts and real-life cases that have helped them grow as leaders.

The first speaker, Alois Eder, CTO of Intel Ignite in Europe, noted that the main pitfall of people who are just starting to manage a team is a drastic change in daily behavior. It is important to stay on the same level as your colleagues and not show arrogance. Such behavior can break trust in the team. The change will still happen, but it will happen on its own. Java Team Lead, Vlad Khlybov, also supported Alois. Being a leader is not easy, but you must develop yourself. Vlad noted that it is important to listen to the team’s needs because trust can be the key element for successful results. Next, Oleks Maistrenko, Technical Manager at IntellectEU, shared his learnings. First, he recommends not underestimating your power. Successful tech leaders should always look at the assumptions and conditions around the team and task. In addition, it is necessary from day one to think about scalability and performance. As a team member, you need to understand your limits, as well as your strengths and weaknesses. Share them with your team, this knowledge improves many work processes. However, in addition to understanding internal capacities, it is also necessary to keep in mind the customers and their desires. The last speaker, Tulio Calsaverini, Senior Product Manager at Nubank Brazil, explained this topic. Tulio pointed out that technical leaders are not builders, their job is to solve customer problems efficiently and effectively, and the only way to make a team more productive is to constantly put what they do in front of reality. Deadlines are getting shorter, and it breaks the rules of perfectionism, but everything takes time. Time is the one thing that will never come back to us.

To sum up, in his workshop, Patrick Qua noted that a technical leader is a software engineer responsible for leading a team and coordinating the technical direction. His main focus is effective management, which requires certain leadership, architectural, and development skills. And we believe that our TLT program has brought this focus to life.

On behalf of CELUS, we thank all participants for the intensive program and Q&A sessions with the participants, which helped them understand what to focus on their journey to becoming a good leader. In addition, we are grateful to the speakers for the incredible stories that changed not only their own lives but also helped to shape new leaders. Learning from your ups and downs is an integral part of personal growth and a strategy for success. And that is what distinguishes a true leader!