Engineering Lead - Achieving Team Goals

Some people (or most people) might find the stress level going up in respect with the uncertainty of success in this people management role. It is important to keep in mind that your performance is not evaluated based on your individual contributions but the team contributions, it's not your performance anymore, it's the team performance! In general, team performance will be tied to team achievements/goals completion.

This post is based on my personal experiences & past mistakes, please take it with a grain of salt. The post will be focusing on tips to achieve your team goals, other perspectives (dealing with stress, challenging your team, growing your teammember, etc2) will be in another posts. Your mileage may vary depending on the expectation of your company/employer.

# Make sure the team is aligned with company goals

In short, you need to communicate clearly what needs to be done, in my case, we're using OKR and use the tool to align with the company goals (by deriving the department's OKR), then we'll iterate the team OKR together one by one with things to be checked:

Each goal must have at least a PIC. If it's not set yet: the earlier you visit this section will result in less uncertainty.
Each PIC must understand the goal and why they're doing it, this is to build the base motivation and get the buy-in from the PIC.

# Plan ahead

Your team have goals, what's next? Planning, why planning is important? I think I can use British Army's 7Ps to explain why: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

There are several key points that I always keep in my mental notes:

Describe the background why we're aiming for a specific goal, you can use a top-bottom model to lower barrier of entry in your plan.
Make sure the PIC understand the details of the plan by planning together, you make the team owns the plan by planning together instead of by yourself.
Write the plan in a sharable-docs (we use google docs).

Remember to open the opportunity for team members (brave souls 🤞) to let them lead the planning and guide if needed, everyone should be able to plan ahead, it's a general skill that will be useful in life.

# Communicate the plan & gather feedback

Your team goals have stakeholders, be it upper management, product team, marketing team, etc2. Communicate the plan to stakeholders & gather feedback, you can do this by setting up a meeting or possibly just via email if the goal is small-medium size (in my case it's usually < 1 week of work).

# Split the work after the plan is approved

At this step you need to split the tasks according to the plan and distribute the work across your team members or other team(s). You can use software for subtasking or just use excel should be ok as long as it's clear.

# Eggggggggggxecute and reporting

This is the grinding part, the PIC will execute the plan and team lead is expected to "guard" the execution a.k.a make sure it's done properly, be ready to get your hands dirty as well, remember to unblock your team member. Let the PIC know explicitly that there might be changes along the road, just remember to revise the plan & report back to stakeholders.

There are 3 kind of reports that I usually find myself do:

Official reporting regarding the project, it depends on your stakeholders, updating the progress in your plan documentation and send the TLDR version via email should be enough in most cases.
Weekly reporting to my manager, this report contains the overall projects progress (achievements/other important highlights) running within the team.
[Optional] Most of the time it's a good idea to setup a specific slack channel (or just use whatever software your company use) for medium-high complexity project and let stakeholders to decide whether they want to join the channel or not, this channel should be useful for organizing chats & discussions scoping.

# The fun and the ugly part

Mission completed? Make sure you give credit where credit is due, credit the PIC, team members and other parties that contribute to the project. Have celebration then focus on the next goal.

The ugly part: mission failed. In this case you take the responsibility. Yes, the team lead is responsible for the project, even though you should held people accountable. Just like a CEO is responsible for the overall success of a company, team lead is responsible for the overall success of a team. In most cases your manager will require a report of what failed and what can be improved. Take it as a learning to get better! You can do it together with your team, remember to back-up each other!

The basic principle to keep in mind: if you fail then you get up together with the team and improve.