You probably know by now how important it’s for us to have tech leadership as a core of our services. We strongly believe that this specific role is key to having high-performance team extension divisions that proactively brings new and better solutions to the table. We’ve found that the tech lead role is key behind our vision of scalability in products, meaning that we create products that are ready for today and prepared for your future.
In a very general sense, tech leads are senior managers who are responsible for everything related to the project’s technology. If you want a deep dive to the definition of the tech lead role please check out more info here. One of the big differences you’ll see from tech leads to sr. developers is the managerial part of the work.
The type of leadership that has shown positive results in software development, comprises a set of skills that will allow the team better results such as: impeccable execution, optimal speed within the deadline, motivation, cohesion and solving unexpected problems.
Experience is a key factor in acquiring all the necessary skills, which is reinforced by constant training programs that ArkusNexus is constantly pushing. One of the most important skills to look for on a tech lead is the ability to manage people and generate interpersonal relationships with its team, this helps the team to be more productive as trust exists between each other and their leader.
Up next are some examples of areas in which having a certified tech lead will improve the team’s performance and consequently, their results.
When you have a team member that has served diverse clients of different sizes and industries, the ability to adapt to the client’s requests is a big differentiator that we find in our tech leads. Usually tech leads are able to identify possible errors in the architecture of different projects, which can be as simple as logistic arrangements to detect that a solution will not work as planned when it’s time to scale the operation. Saving not only a lot of time, but a lot of money to the company the tech lead is working for.
By understanding different situations that might happen just by looking at the architecture or the blueprints of a project that is going to be developed, the deadline a tech lead brings to you is much more realistic because it’s taking in consideration all the possible outcomes that can affect the project in the near future, here is where the leader’s experience comes to play to add value even before the project starts, having realistic and well-justified deadlines is not only better for the team that is working on the software application, but also to the client that can expect a well polished product on the first deliverable.
As we’ve mentioned before, the tech lead is a people’s position, you’ll need to not only know your team members strengths but to understand what’s happening in their lives at different moments in time, by having this connection to their team tech leads understand the availability of their team mates without even consulting beforehand, this leads to making quick decisions when the technology of a certain project is being defined as the tech lead knows if X or Y person that is an expert in a certain technology is going to be 100% available from the start or maybe not and for that reason take another path while defining the architecture.
At this moment in time, AI is not replacing tech leaders because it is incapable of being creative and using different approaches to solve a determined situation. AI is productive in routine and repetitive tasks as well as systematic and constant thinking, but it’s not intended for so-called soft problems.
However, leadership under the application of AI tends to change in regards to constantly evaluating which tasks are most appropriate to assign to a person or a machine, this way we can avoid certain areas where AI is more efficient than humans and adapt it to work in an AI environment. Integrity and emotional intelligence will be key valuable areas to have for future technological leaders as AI is not capable of developing those traits just yet, and we believe that’s not something AI developers are even interested in creating as of today.
