Tech Lead

Purpose of the role

Tech Leads are responsible for leading their team, ensuring teams have sufficient direction, and are capable of delivering their goals.

They line manage members of their team, and collaboratively set direction alongside other leadership roles in Product Leadership Groups.

About the role

Tech leads at Redgate are key to the success of our teams and the quality of the products we sell. The role requires a mix of skills; team leadership, hands-on programming, technical leadership, people management and customer focus. As a Tech Lead you will manage a team of software engineers and as such have a huge influence over their personal growth as well as their productivity as a team.

A tech lead will be consistently doing / exhibiting most of the points below.

Skills

Leadership

• Leads the team by making goals clear and getting consensus on them.
• Promotes an agile and lean approach to software development encouraging continuous improvement.
• Create a psychologically safe environment where team members feel comfortable expressing ideas and concerns, promoting debate and decision making.
• Delegates tasks and responsibilities to ensure required work gets done and team gain skills and experience.
• Collaborates with leaders in their product group and the coaches team to improve development practices, solve problems in the team and ensure their team get the support they need; Knows when to solve problems within the team and when to escalate.
• Ensures the team is transparent about what they are doing and why.

Mentorship

• Applies differing leadership styles depending on the person and task; able to direct, guide, support and coach depending on the person and the task.
• Has a good, constructive relationship with all members of their team, based on trust and mutual respect. Knows their opinions, their strengths, weaknesses and aspirations.
• Able to have open and honest discussions of their people’s performance. Gives constructive feedback and difficult feedback that lands well and drives improvement.
• Actively develops their team members, giving them opportunities and motivation to improve and grow professionally.

Role-Specific

• Understands the technical challenges of the team. Understands the impact of technology choices on the team.
• Able to identify problems with and improvements to technology and tools; encourages developers to own investigation and proposals for fixes and improvements.
• Management skills (mentoring, coaching, development, admin, planning, etc).
• Wide range of coaching skills, including solution-focussed coaching, the taps model, performance coaching.
• Manages members of the team.
• Provides structure and processes that help the team tackle their goals.
• Manages time efficiently by prioritising and using delegation to share the work load.

Communication

• Represents the team to the rest of the division and vice versa. Gets involved in wider discussions/issues for the benefit of the team.
• Responds to queries and requests from the rest of the business.

Emotional Intelligence

• Cares for their people; is primarily concerned with their people’s well-being and is considerate of their feelings and needs.
• Works actively to maintain/improve morale in the team.
• Detects and responds to the needs of their team and its members. Ensures team members have a good work-life balance, and are taking enough holiday.
• Know when to solve problems within the team and when to escalate. Balance direct contribution with enabling team members' successes.
• Guide team in developing emotional intelligence. Lead by example and discuss its importance in technical roles.
• Provide constructive feedback with kindness and clarity. Adapt communication styles to suit different team members and situations.
• Maintain composure during challenges. Recognize and manage emotions while modeling resilience and building trust across the organization.

Delivery

• Able to estimate delivery of work across the team, proactively informing product leadership groups and stakeholders on progress.
• Effectively manages deliverables for the team, ensuring the prioritised work is planned and valuable to our goals.
• Actively removes distractions and low impact work.
• Facilitates generation of progression plans to develop careers of team members.

Business Knowledge

• Has a deep knowledge of our product(s) and the market in which these products operate.
• Engages with Redgate’s customers and their product’s users, gaining insight and feedback that they share with the team.
• Develops good working relationships with other functions that contribute to product’s success - Sales, Marketing, Sales Engineers.
• Keep abreast of technical developments in the industry that may be of interest to Redgate.
• Successfully manages and prioritizes their varied workload, ensuring they have time to contribute to development tasks.
• Collaborates and coordinates with other development teams at Redgate for mutual benefit.