The Role of a Team Lead

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Development Management

The Team Lead: A Versatile Role

A team lead (aka senior developer or team leader) is one of those “specialists” whose responsibilities are often viewed differently. Here’s how these varied perceptions typically arise: someone works under a team lead who excels at system design and concludes that this is the core responsibility of a team lead. In another team, a lead struggles with sprint planning but manages other responsibilities reasonably well, leading the team to believe that planning isn’t something a team lead should be doing.

Developers who have spent a long time within a single company or even the same team often have a clear opinion about what a team lead is and what their duties entail. On the other hand, developers and managers who have experienced various projects gradually come to understand that a team lead’s role can encompass a wide range of activities. Some tasks align better with the role, while others do not, making it difficult to provide a strict definition of what a team lead does.

Why Do Perceptions of a Team Lead Differ?

Note: Here and throughout the article, I am referring to team leads exclusively within development teams. However, much of this discussion likely applies to other types of teams and activities as well.

I’ve encountered team leads taking on roles such as project manager, system analyst, tester, designer, interface architect, software architect, and even user support specialist.

In practice, and especially in healthy organizations, I’ve observed that the role of a team lead is usually filled by developers who feel a heightened sense of responsibility for the product they are working on. This often grows into hyper-responsibility, which management tends to leverage effectively.

Note on Hyper-Responsibility: I define this as a situation where an individual feels responsible for circumstances they lack the authority to influence. I don’t assign a positive or negative connotation to this quality; it’s simply an observation that some individuals exhibit this trait.

This sense of hyper-responsibility often drives the team lead to take on tasks for which no dedicated role exists. Gradually, these tasks become associated with the team lead position itself. Meanwhile, other team members grow accustomed to these responsibilities being part of the lead’s role, further reinforcing this perception for any future team leads.

Of course, this phenomenon isn’t exclusive to team leads. To varying degrees, it applies to any position in any organization. However, the team lead role is particularly susceptible to this effect.

What Is the Core Role of a Team Lead?

What skills and qualities should someone possess to be a good team lead—before being a great architect or analyst?

The simplest definition I can give for a team lead is this:
“A team lead is the interface of the development team.”

The team lead is accountable for everything the team is responsible for. They have the authority to build the team and assign its members to tasks as they see fit to achieve the team’s goals.

If the team is tasked with system design, the team lead ensures that someone handles the design. If the team is responsible for developing the user interface, the team lead decides who will take on that responsibility. This applies to any task assigned to the team: in the eyes of the world outside the team, the team lead is accountable for its completion.

What Must a Team Lead Do?

A team lead’s job is to ensure that every team member can successfully complete their assigned tasks. To achieve this, they need to ensure:

• Team members agree to take on tasks.
• Team members are competent enough to handle these tasks.
• The team has sufficient resources (primarily time).
• Team members can work well together.

This, in essence, defines the team lead’s scope of work. Let’s break it down

Leadership

“It’s necessary for team members to agree to take on tasks”—this phrasing may be clunky, but I couldn’t come up with anything more elegant. The essence is that a team member should accept a task with the intent to see it through to completion. They shouldn’t refuse to take on tasks by ignoring instructions, citing “flawed solutions,” or quietly sabotaging the process while pretending to work on something else. Instead, they should approach tasks with the determination to complete them.

How can you make someone want to complete a task? There are countless methods—from coercion with threats (not recommended) to promising a trip to a developer conference. This ability to inspire action is what I define as leadership.

The stronger the leader, the greater the variety of team members they can effectively manage. From my observations, leadership can be maintained through various factors:

1. Demonstrating genuine personal interest in the project’s success.
   In a modern development team, everyone sees what others are doing, how they’re doing it, and how much effort they’re putting in. Developers are more likely to follow someone who visibly strives for the success of the project, even if that person lacks formal authority. This often stems from a desire to help. Such leaders can maintain initiative—at least until they burn out or lose interest in the project.
2. Possessing superior knowledge of technologies and the project’s architecture.
   Developers seeking professional growth often gravitate toward leaders with deep expertise. However, as the team grows and members reach similar levels of expertise, the leader may lose their advantage. This often results in constant criticism of their decisions or even subtle defiance.
3. Earning respect through personal qualities.
   When someone is objective, fair, and consistent, team members tend to trust their decisions. However, it takes time for a team to recognize these qualities in a leader. During this time, another leader might emerge and seize initiative. This factor is the most resilient to changes within the team.
4. Exploiting the emotions of individual team members.
   This involves manipulating team members to align with the leader’s agenda (think of the movie Filth—IMDb). I’ve seen leaders like this and even worked under one early in my career—thankfully, I realized the situation and left. Needless to say, experienced professionals who know their worth are unlikely to be manipulated for long.
5. Using administrative authority.
   This involves leveraging formal power to enforce compliance. When this is the only factor sustaining leadership, it often results in a “boss vs. subordinate” dynamic (“I’m the boss, you’re the fool”). This approach works only with a limited subset of team members.

These factors are based on my personal observations, but the list could certainly be expanded. Even with these examples, you can create countless combinations. In practice, a team lead must identify, develop, and maintain a sufficient mix of these factors to sustain their leadership.

Team Competence

Competent team members are typically selected by filtering out less qualified candidates. Team leads often rely on support from others in this process, including HR professionals, line managers, project managers, and proactive colleagues.

Many team leads fail to realize that it’s ultimately their responsibility to ensure unqualified candidates don’t join the team. While they can rely on the opinions of HR, leadership, or peers, the responsibility for accepting someone onto the team lies with the lead.

What about rejecting qualified candidates? In practice, such errors are harder to detect. As a result, it’s often easier to reject a candidate in doubt—something many leads resort to. Moreover, other stakeholders (HR, managers) may also veto candidates. In hiring, the power of veto is typically considered reasonable.

Note: A frequent disconnect between authority and responsibility arises when team leads are excluded from hiring decisions or lack the ability to remove underperforming team members. Despite this, they remain accountable for ensuring the team delivers results—an example of imposed hyper-responsibility.

The Professionalism of a Team Lead

A team lead’s professionalism manifests in their ability to efficiently and effectively staff the team with competent individuals.

• Efficiency: The quicker the hiring process, the better.
• Cost-effectiveness: Hiring should be done while minimizing costs (not just salary), provided competence levels remain sufficient to achieve the team’s goals.

There are two principal approaches to team building:

1. Hiring experienced specialists from the job market.
2. Training talent in-house.

Most strategies are combinations of these two. The extremes—headhunting only experts or hiring exclusively from internship programs—often signal systemic issues. The team lead’s role is to find a compromise that suits the specific situation.

What Could Go Wrong?

Here are some common pitfalls:

1. Hiring unqualified candidates.
   This often results from a failure to assess professional qualities during interviews. Examples include asking irrelevant questions or focusing too heavily on esoteric technical details rather than practical skills. Inevitably, unqualified hires struggle to meet team obligations, leading to project delays and failures.
2. Only hiring experts.
   Some leads, either due to past hiring mistakes or an ambition to create a “dream team,” set unrealistically high standards. This approach often leads to extended hiring cycles, increased costs, and delayed project timelines. Once the team is assembled, overqualified members may struggle with mundane tasks, creating a tense atmosphere where minor disagreements escalate into conflicts.
3. Ignoring the need for specialized roles.
   Leads may overlook the need for niche expertise—frontend developers, database specialists, interface designers, etc. This results in backend engineers building poorly functioning frontends or teams wasting months on SQL optimizations that could have been solved by a database expert.
4. Unbalanced hiring.
   For example, hiring a large group of juniors at once can overwhelm the team with questions and broken processes, leaving no time for reviews or mentoring. Conversely, postponing hiring until a key team member leaves can leave the team understaffed and unable to meet deadlines.
5. Last-minute developer additions.
   Attempting to save a failing project by adding new developers late in the process often exacerbates the situation. A good team lead would prevent such decisions from being made.

Ultimately, there’s no universal answer to how a team should be staffed. The solution depends on the specific project and organization. However, a team lead must consider the nature of the project’s tasks, their urgency, the cost of delays, market conditions, and the feasibility of training specialists in-house.

Estimating Work

To avoid overcommitting the team, it is essential to evaluate resources, typically focusing on the available working hours of team members. The team lead is ultimately responsible for ensuring the team delivers on its commitments. Regardless of how the work is estimated—whether individually, collectively, or by a single person—the team lead bears the accountability for those estimates.

This means that the team lead has the authority to intervene and adjust any estimation, which can be useful when team opinions differ. Furthermore, in many organizations, if tasks are assigned based on structured plans, the development team—represented by the team lead—commits to executing the plan. In iterative development methodologies, for instance, the team lead assumes responsibility for completing all tasks taken on during the iteration.

In modern development approaches, management rarely dictates how the team should perform its work or who should handle specific tasks. Management's primary concern is whether the team can deliver on time, not how it accomplishes this. Interestingly, even Scrum—a popular methodology—remains silent on task distribution, leaving the team to decide “who does what.”

When I explored how task distribution happens in practice, I found the answer satisfying: in any team, sooner or later, a leader emerges to resolve conflicts over task allocation. This supports the argument that task distribution is also part of the team lead’s role.

Planning and Task Distribution

Surprisingly, evaluating, planning, and distributing tasks becomes much simpler if the team lead successfully fulfills their other responsibilities. With competent and motivated team members, the process of estimation and task execution is straightforward. The team lead’s role is to organize and oversee this process to ensure smooth execution. Established development methodologies often provide ready-made solutions for this.

Note: If you're unsure which methodology to adopt under normal circumstances, start with Scrum. It’s simple, well-defined, and tends to work effectively without requiring significant adaptation.

Team Dynamics

At a minimum, successful task completion requires team members to collaborate without undue irritation.

This might seem like an easy goal, but it’s far from simple. If a conflict arises between team members, it often can only be resolved by removing someone from the team. However, preventing conflicts is well within the team lead’s control. While there are no universal guidelines, one rule is clear: conflicts should never be ignored. Any incident requires a response, and the appropriate response depends on the circumstances.

The team lead should also consider the personalities of team members. While the team might tolerate one overly meticulous individual, having two could prove too much (no offense to meticulous people—I’m one myself).

As for enhancing interactions among team members, there’s a discipline called “team building.” Personally, I’m skeptical about its effectiveness, which might stem from my lack of exposure to competent team-building specialists. While I intended to skip this section, it felt wrong to leave it out entirely.

Conclusion

A team lead’s core responsibilities revolve around ensuring the team’s functionality—its ability to complete assigned tasks. Everything else a team lead takes on—whether voluntarily or by obligation—is supplementary. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For instance, I’ve established a personal rule that team leads in development teams should actively participate in coding, architecture design, and similar activities. This helps them maintain a deep understanding of the system. Without direct involvement, this understanding can gradually fade.

Many developers can relate to situations where they leave an actively developed project for several months and return to find only fragments of the familiar architecture. However, as discussed earlier, direct development is not a core responsibility of a team lead. In some projects, it may even be unnecessary.

In reality, team leads are not alone in addressing these challenges. They receive support from managers and colleagues in adjacent departments. However, when this support escalates into decision-making on behalf of the team lead, it’s a red flag. Such situations indicate that the lead’s responsibilities are being transferred to others. Whether to fight this or accept it is up to the individual, but it’s certainly worth paying attention to the true state of affairs.

Discussion

I’m interested in hearing from developers (in the broad sense—anyone working within development teams), team leads, line managers, and project managers. Do you agree with this breakdown of the team lead’s role? Do you have any comments or suggestions?

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team lead team building project management