Tech Lead doing 80% Product Owner work and frustrated
Posted by masone81@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 160 comments
I’ll try to not make this an unproductive rant. I’m a Tech Lead at a medium to large private corporation. I’m coming up on 8 years of experience and while I’m not the strongest coder when it comes to hard comp sci or algorithms, I know how to write readable code and keep a stack from becoming unmaintainable. I’m especially fortunate to have several engineers on my team who are helping to build a solid stack that is a joy to work with.
The problem is that I tend to spend 80% of my time doing the job of a Product Owner:
- Watch the communication channels to do triage and pull out action items (there are SO many all the time, real showstopper stuff)
- Manage the Jira backlog
- Prioritize the Kanban board
- Shape tickets until they are actionable by the dev team
- Balance feature work with technical debt
- Make sure that our daily work is leading the project to the desired business outcomes
- Leading the agile ceremonies (“calibration”, standup, retrospective)
- Planning releases, managing and communicating exactly what went out and when
I could keep adding to the list but you get the idea. It’s all of the logistics of keeping a team of 9 engineers, 2 QA people, as well as a small offshore team all organized and heading in the same direction. I’m good at this… and I’m so sick of doing it.
I want to be designing technical strategy, working on DevEx and building a platform that is solid and a joy to work in, writing code, mentoring the other devs to improve their code quality and technical skills, improving our telemetry so we catch problems before they are noticed, etc. I have very little time for any of this.
There have been a few times when my boss just advised me to “let that stuff go so someone else can step in.” The most recent time I tried this, we got 2 months behind on a critical feature and are still playing catch up. I just assumed that the team and I would be given tickets when something needed to be done but it never happened. It was a rude awakening when we realized that no one connected outcomes that “The Business” was anticipating with actual action items for the team.
Relatedly, the dev team can’t get our questions answered. We ask in Slack (our primary comms tool) and simply get ignored. So we implement features to the best of our ability and release them, only to hear “why didn’t you do X, Y, Z???” to which I answer, “we literally never heard of those things.”
I could keep going but will stop there. I’ve never worked on a team where the devs were this great but all of the surrounding support was this detached and disinterested.
Does anyone have any helpful advice on how I can survive here and how I can emphasize to my boss that we need a true Product Owner to help us?
Quiet_Form_2800@reddit
Use kanban to make it easier for you. Scrum may not be a fit here unless you have 12+ members.
masone81@reddit (OP)
We basically do Scrumban. No sprints because no one could understand that some things in the sprint might not get done. So we went to Kanban and prioritized lists of work, but kept standups and retro and a weekly “calibration.”
bulbishNYC@reddit
Is there a way to get promoted out of this position so your technical responsibilities go away? It will be a lot easier if you are doing pure management and do not have to worry about nuts and bolts.
Tech lead in many orgs is just the worst position that catches all responsibilities - product, project, administrative, people management. And still expected to code, lol. This one person proved super knowledgeable and versatile, so we will avoid hiring 2-3 more people and stretch him to do everything. You are that night shift Burger King worker that takes orders, makes sandwiches and cleans bathrooms when it quiets. On one salary.
Either fast track to management role where you drop the code part, or step back into senior position where you drop the manager part. Meanwhile, you will be stuck running the hamster wheel.
masone81@reddit (OP)
Thank you for the advice, but that is the opposite of what I want. I really don’t want to stop the technical work and double down on management. It’s more likely that I would scale back to a senior developer role and let all the management stuff go. The problem there is I really do care about the success of the whole team and it’s hard for me to just work my tickets and sit back and watch the world burn.
bulbishNYC@reddit
I feel Tech Lead in most places is a just a step into management. You are picking up a whole bunch of management skills that are not useful for a developer career or interviews, and your actual hands-on skills stagnate.
You can care about the success of the whole team in Senior developer role too. People should be listening if you are tenured and respected.
Quiet_Form_2800@reddit
Owing to genAI Developer roles are already commoditized heavily and cost cut.
masone81@reddit (OP)
What you said about tech lead being an overloaded position is absolutely true in my case. That’s good insight there and I’m glad I’m not alone in noticing this.
bulbishNYC@reddit
Observe how much easier are the lives of everyone around you. Engineers care nothing outside of small scope of the project they are working on, no management worries at all - let it all burn. Managers do not go deeper than spreadsheets, UX mocks or powerpoint, they have it easy too.
lordlod@reddit
Brutal take: They didn't make you tech lead because you can type fast.
This is a leadership role, the hint is in the word lead. And most of that leadership isn't fun, the hint is the fact that you get paid.
Leadership is about enabling others, leveraging your knowledge to get more velocity out of everyone else in the team. The fact that your personal code contributions drop is the price of your time, it is good that you are experiencing that. My personal leadership/management tactic is to remove myself from the critical path as much as possible, it lets me do the leadership stuff without feeling like I'm letting folks down.
On the business stuff it sounds like you need to invest more time building relationships outside of your team, that is part of your job now. You should understand what your manager needs so that you can anticipate it before you are asked (with the lovely bonus that they will trust you and leave you alone). You should also be building relationships with your internal clients and other teams that you integrate with, partly so that you understand what they need and what they can do for you, partly so that they answer your questions when you reach out to them.
masone81@reddit (OP)
This is good advice. I will admit that I don’t build relationships all that well, especially with people who are actively disengaged (almost antagonistically so.) I was brought in as an agent of change and many people don’t like me for it. But yeah, I think if I would’ve invested in a relationships more that I may be getting more support than I am now.
lordlod@reddit
To effectively drive change I would suggest strongly leaning into the relationship side.
Resistance to change tends to be cultural rather than technical, the best way to identify and manage that is by building relationships, identifying the key figures and winning them over, or working around them.
Quiet_Form_2800@reddit
How to do that. Lots of work to do that. May not have time. Can you detail how to build relationships, when everyone is so busy with full calenders doubly booked?
IrrationalSwan@reddit
If you reported to me and shared this list of things keeping you from development, this is how I'd respond. Take this with a massive grain of salt -- may not apply to you at all, but gives you a sense of how someone else might respond.
Things you say are taking up your time:
Watch the communication channels to do triage and pull out action items (there are SO many all the time, real showstopper stuff)
To me this seems like a process and training gap. Why isn't there a small set of jira forms / integrations people can use to send bugs to a single board automatically, and why haven't people been trained over time to use it? Why is triaging the bugs that come in the job of one person, not something that a rotating person or team does?
Shape tickets until they are actionable by the dev team
Why is one person doing this vs team or devs refining? Why aren't forms, required fields etc guiding people to creste tickets with the necessary information to start refinement?
This reads like you creating dependency on yourself rather than using process + team training to share or reduce the load.
Leading the agile ceremonies (“calibration”, standup, retrospective)
Why do you personally have to lead all these, vs training others to lead them in the way you need? Are all these ceremonies necessary and productive?
Planning releases, managing and communicating exactly what went out and when
If you have the concept of releases, I'm assuming you're not a full ci/CD shop, but this really reads like something that should be automated -- e.g. using a commit format for pr's that has information to be pulled into release notes, or pulling from jira epics or something.
If this is not currently the case, in my view the work of a tech lead would be to make it the case rather than creating dependencies in themselves, and perpetuating a labor intensive, manual process that doesn't scale.
Manage the Jira backlog
What's included in "manage" here? Have you trained others to do pieces of this so that there isn't a bus factor of one? Is this better done by the team together in a backlog grooming session?
How much of this management is for jira items that won't hit team for more than a month? I'd view all that work as waste probably.
Prioritize the Kanban board
Seems like an important thing to do, but why is it taking to such a large chunk of your time? Are you prioritizing super granular items?
Balance feature work with technical debt
The idea that feature work and tech debt have to be separate things is a misconception in my view, but isn't this just prioritization again?
Make sure that our daily work is leading the project to the desired business outcomes
This is one of the main things I want tech leads to do.
Overall, to me it reads like you may be spending too much time doing housekeeping yourself in manual ways that create dependency on you vs eliminating and automating manual processes, training the team to do things themselves, and maximizing the time you spend on things you and only you can do -- provide real technical leadership.
masone81@reddit (OP)
Thank you for the feedback.
I agree I should automate and delegate more. The automation is being built and we are doing that as much as possible.
Delegation is harder. I really try to protect my engineers from a lot of this tedium of planning and communication work. I could spread that work out, but now I have more engineers on the team bogged down by product ownership, which honestly they would probably be pretty bad at. And a big part of the product owner role is collaborating with stakeholders outside of the team and being intimately aware of the needs of the business. The engineers are not great at that, including me.
TiredLead@reddit
😂 Yep.
The folks telling you to simply train all the people around you so that the load will be spread are living in Lala land. Like you say, most devs are bad at it, and the requisite skills don't tend to be trainable.
You might be able to split the task across yourself and one or two well-trusted leader-oriented devs. If that person doesn't already exist, they're not going to magically appear, and the company is unlikely to hire someone specifically for that role because you are already doing a great job at it, and honestly even if they hired a person for it they'd probably do a bad job too (at least for the first year or so).
Maybe you can convince your manager's manager to hire a second manager to take over some of your manager's directs. But it's rare to be able to successfully manage up in that way.
Your best bet is probably to find a new team 😃
IrrationalSwan@reddit
I'd challenge the idea that engineers shouldn't learn to be good at collaborating with stakeholders, understanding the business, communication and so on. They might not always be natural skills, but they're crucial to advancing to senior+ roles and having larger scale impact.
Are you denying some members of the team the chance to grow (with coaching and help of course)?
Hot-Claim-501@reddit
It's very true and valid for 2019. In 2024 you have to be cautious about fully automating and delegating your job responsibilities. Especially if you are the most expensive line in the department payroll list.
verzac05@reddit
Seems like an odd mindset. To me, it's like as if you're saying "don't build software, else you'd be replaced by them".
Someone still needs to maintain the delegation and act as an escalation channel. Someone still needs to calm down that angry VP of Whateverland from tearing your team a new one just because they didn't respond to the ticket they've logged within 1 working day.
If anything, freeing up your time means that you can do more work that is potentially of higher value, instead of getting bogged down by minutiae.
ub3rh4x0rz@reddit
Been there.
Line up another gig as a senior IC. In hindsight I wish I was more willing to consider staying after I was given the option to change roles, match my offer, pre-vested shares, etc. Ultimately I think I made the right choice leaving though as I'm sure it would have taken at least a year to not be expected to do both roles.
Limp_Day1216@reddit
Okay a couple of things here.
One as a scrum master I am pretty appalled at what I am reading. Please know 100% you and your team are doing everything right, but the other side is just plain buttfucking you and doing, I dunno, fuck all????? They should 100% have a roadmap and helping you all knock out stories that will fulfill features that fulfill epics, or just epics depending on how your company does things. You guys deserve so much recognition for going above and beyond, and while I’m not, I would 100% fight for you as a SM. I know that does not mean much, but I am personally sorry you’re going through this bullshit.
Second, I know this sounds hard but you have to let go. It is not your job, but it quickly will become your job if you keep going. They will eventually realize they don’t need a PO, and that you can do it ALL yourself. Let the ship go down. It’s tough I know, because your work suffers and that’s not fair, but it’s not your fault if the work is not organized and prioritized.
Overall I am super sorry you’re going through this. This is why I enjoy being a SM. I know we get flack for not doing much, and I agree some don’t, but the good ones do genuinely care and want the developers to not have to deal this this shit so they can handle the stuff you described.
UnspeakablePudding@reddit
Sounds like every senior technical role I've ever had. I'm my experience, once you get to a certain point the title and job description don't matter very much. Sr dev, tech lead, architect, to a greater or lesser extent what you're describing is the job.
Every place and team is different, but the higher you go the less real technical work you have time for.
masone81@reddit (OP)
I’m getting several “just go with it, man” responses and honestly they are very helpful. I can adjust my expectations or shift down to an IC role. At least I’m getting some clarity and helpful feedback.
UnspeakablePudding@reddit
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that's how it should be, or the best use of your talents.
I also enjoy the nature of this work more than a pure technical position, and thankfully when I first moved into it, it was made clear my opportunities to act as an individual contribute would be much smaller.
It sounds to me like whoever hired you did you a disservice and didn't explain or perhaps understand what goes into a technical leadership role.
Don't be afraid to make a change. One of the smartest and most experienced developers I work with right now actually had my role before I joined the organization. I'm where I am by virtue of him disliking it and going back to an IC role.
Same with me in a way, I spent a year as a resource manager and was bored to death. Don't burn yourself up or be miserable if you don't like what you're doing.
csanon212@reddit
I did this for 1.5 years and it was unsustainable. I was the lead developer, the architect, the product owner, the scrum master, and the manager. There is no easy way to get out of this while staying at your current company because this requires acceptance by management that they need to actually hire different people for these roles. I personally lined up a new job where I took on 2 of these 5 roles for more money. That's the easiest and fastest way out of this.
Best-Information5208@reddit
This is my life right now 😂
dvali@reddit
"I'm not technical"
Then you can fuck off Matt and get a job you're actually able to do, and let someone useful do this one. Sick to death of hearing this, especially in year three when they've had plenty of time to learn every little detail.
OdeeSS@reddit
Sooooo much this. I feel like all of our product people have this learned helplessness where they refuse to learn how to do anything because they're "no technical." I have to play tech support just to show them how to use their own tools.
dvali@reddit
Yeah showing them how to use their own tools is a pet peeve of mine. If someone can't even use outlook then why on earth were they given what is essentially the admin job? I wouldn't expect to teach the handyman to use a hammer, I shouldn't be first line IT for people who don't have basic computer literacy. They're literally not qualified for their jobs and for some reason it's my problem.
The average employee should know way more about Outlool than I do.
SoccerBeerRepeat@reddit
I am a PO and would agree some don’t care to understand. Don’t have to be technical but need to understand one or two layers deeper than basics.
MrGitErDone@reddit
This. Also made me giggle cuz I have to work on and off with a Matt that is PM/PO and isn’t technical. Even though he was a dev for several years prior… 🫠
dvali@reddit
Mine has never been a dev put he has a PhD in chemical engineering. He should have no issue understanding basic code concepts.
fdsafdsa1232@reddit
what will grind your gears is how much they complain yet are getting paid at a technical level
exploradorobservador@reddit
I have had someone who wants to make the design decisions, but when presented with the design in modeling diagrams and documents does not want to use them as a basis. They are building an incomplete mental model of the internals from black box interaction with the product. I am this person's report so I don't even know how to handle it other than ignore and redirect discussion in hopes it is forgotten. I've tried explaining, it is dismissed...
MighMoS@reddit
THIS. Scrum, blocker, BRD, Intake - if I could learn your language you can learn mine.
exploradorobservador@reddit
I have a boss who doesn't understand the architecture and comes up with his own model of it based on assumptions. He insists on white box discussion using terms that we do not know nor understand entirely. I don't know how to address this behavior without seeming impertinent.
He also does not understand how fundamental systems (RDBMS) and processes (requirements elicitation, issue tracking) work in enough detail to insists that he knows better than these stalwart accepted practices. I get that there are flaky parts of software or evangelical / magical pitfalls in software, but the mentioned are sort of the opposite of that.
He asks us to make changes to the system based off of this incorrect basis and is unwilling to change his opinions and see that we actually don't know better than the thousands of years and years of pain that developed these systems and processes.
95% of the time I get to steer the project unsupervised but periodically he steps in and overrides me, sometimes ripping out perfectly good plumbing. That's fine, its my job, and he's actually a very sharp engineer but not a SWE. It's gotten to the point where if I am considering leaving. I have not left yet because I have gotten to do everything infrastructure up for years but I don't want to work like this anymore and I'm not sure if they will ever get the software in a customer's hands.
xku6@reddit
It's better to be visibly and officially doing the PO job than to be a "shadow PO" who still does the work that the official PO can't do or doesn't understand.
tony_sant@reddit
Same i have to work with pms who have no idea how product works at all🥲, their lack of ability is very disturbing and to add to that we have bunch of junior devs who have no idea what they are doing😂
CodyTheLearner@reddit
Y’all hiring. I know enough to be dangerous 😂
Zelda-Annie@reddit
Hire me…. I can be your PO.😀😀😀
CreativelyRandomDude@reddit
Actually it sounds like you're mostly doing a tech lead job. Product manager job is more around deciding on business features and business requirements and then sending them to your team. It sounds your triaging what's being sent and prioritizing it against a larger backlog of tech deck, etc. It's quite common for PMs not to manage a backlog and for a TLA manager backlog, so I don't really see any issue here. If you want the PM to do more, talk to them.
GorgieGoergie@reddit
Your boss gave you permission to not do those tasks.
So stop doing them and stop taking work so personally.
SmoothCCriminal@reddit
Exactly what I’m facing. I’ve resigned today. Back to greener IC fields, hopefully.. someday
politicatessen@reddit
asking for requirements and not getting them is how stakeholders achieved two objectives:
culpable deniability and designing via programming.
hkd987@reddit
Does your team have a PO?
masone81@reddit (OP)
No, that’s what my post is about. :-)
hkd987@reddit
You sure you’re not the PO?
masone81@reddit (OP)
Exactly
hkd987@reddit
With that said
Don’t write stories write the epics and let a developer on your team break the work down into stories.
Don’t lead ceremony’s make a developer on the team lead meetings.
Learn to delegate more of the workload so you can focus on doing what you want and what will have a bigger impact on the team. If you keep doing it no one else will step up and since you have to be the PO and chase down requirements and write epics while also prioritizing the backlog you don’t have time for much else.
jollydev@reddit
This is great advice. Not only does it free up your time as a lead but it also creates greater buy-in and motivation in the team. And the entire team won't depend on your presence to keep the machine going.
Could also be a good career move, since you can work more on strategic work while preparing others for taking on a lead role.
barravian@reddit
Never once has asking me to write my own tickets or lead scrum meetings increased my motivation or buy-in.
This is definitely the path forward, but I wouldn't count on it boosting motivation haha
dezsiszabi@reddit
Exactly. My first thought would be "now I have to do this sh*t as well, great!"
jollydev@reddit
So out of curiosity, what would be motivating for you? What would make you personally feel more passionate about the work the team is doing ?
TangerineSorry8463@reddit
As a developer, I don't want to deal with bureaucracy.
Externally motivated developers will want to make cool shit, ship things that makes my friends from the industry go "wow", and get well compensated for that.
Internally motivated developers will want to make cool shit to high technical standards for the feeling of Job Well Done, and get well compensated for that.
Wasting time because Product Owner couldn't be arsed to spell the table or column name correctly in the ticket is an opposite of that.
jollydev@reddit
But doing product work or generally moving forward a product development team by organizing the work isn't bureaucracy. It's all necessary to deliver and ship cool shit.
NUTTA_BUSTAH@reddit
It is exactly that bureaucracy that developers generally don't want on their plate. It's an another day at the office for the PO, it's outside of the scope for the devs.
RioTheGOAT@reddit
Just curious are you worried about being replaced by AI + architect?
NUTTA_BUSTAH@reddit
Not at all
jollydev@reddit
Appreciate hearing that. I'vd always felt more involved and a higher degree of responsibility when getting to come up with solutions or widen the perspective from pure implementation.
Just goes to prove we're all different. May I ask what motivates you or makes you feel buy-in in the team's direction?
barravian@reddit
Designing projects and designing solutions is awesome and definitely gets me buy-in.
Just at my company (and most other big tech I've heard about), that's a completely distinct process from creating Jira tickets which is more about spending your day checking box, filling out forms, and copying and pasting from the PRD. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
The ticket titles and points are already determined for me, I just need to fill them out (and this counts 0 hours toward the 40 hours were expected to log).
What you're talking about is getting assigned the discovery ticket. Getting to spend a couple of days sketching out diagrams, reading through code, presenting to architects.
That, generally, does motivate me.
NUTTA_BUSTAH@reddit
I partly disagree, as that is delegating the responsibilities to devs, who should be shielded from these responsibilities in the first place. Some of it is okay, but it quickly turns into a situation where the dev(s) are now the OP with "SWE doing 80% PO work"
ElbowWavingOversight@reddit
I think the point they're making is that everything you've described is exactly within the responsibilities of a tech lead at some companies. I work at a FAANG and these are all exactly the things that tech leads are expected do: drive sprints, do product planning, determine technical direction, prioritize features against business needs, release management, and so on. In some organizations they're also expected to be people managers. Tech leads are some of the most senior people in the organization, and are usually central to everything the team does.
rudiXOR@reddit
Hmm but usually you do that WITH the PO not alone. So that's the problem here
ElbowWavingOversight@reddit
At the companies I’ve been at, no such role even exists. Nobody has the title of “product owner” or “scrum master” - that’s the point. It’s all just part of the job of the TL or sometimes EM. It’s like how there are no dedicated QA roles either. QA is just part of every SWE’s job. Maybe this is just a FAANG thing.
RioTheGOAT@reddit
No you are correct; not just MAANG but let’s say even tech adjacent, either the companies are too big and old to know how to do modern SDLC or they are run too lean to have separate people for each task. Why do people stay there? Probably same reason as MAANG, money.
PedanticProgarmer@reddit
Isn’t this hell? Full responsibility, zero power.
You are the most technically competent person in the team, but you are also filling in for the incopetent and lazy managers. Fuck that.
stinkysulphide@reddit
Use https://wheelofnames.com to decide who gets to run the ceremony. Same for ceremonies. Start delegating man !
mangoes_now@reddit
Yeah, but are you the PO?
TangerineSorry8463@reddit
How did we in general allow PO to become a non-coding role?
I'm slowly spoonfeeding my PO on how to use Github to make changes in documentation. Once he gets there, I might even ask him to start writing a couple tests, because that's legitimately knowing how the product works.
cristiand90@reddit
Depending on the industry, the PO needs to have industry knowledge, about the product.
Having a person that knows that very well, and is technical, is a unicorn and most likely won't remain a PO for very long.
spudtheimpaler@reddit
No they're the OP
spudtheimpaler@reddit
Or why not both? PO-OP.
Sorry, couldn't resist...
just_anotjer_anon@reddit
Maybe a BA would fit them better
TopTraffic3192@reddit
That was my first thought.
SoftSkillSmith@reddit
Ask for a raise now! You're the PO and tech lead
No_Paramedic_4881@reddit
Honestly, this sounds like most PM’s I’ve worked with Also, pure tech comedic gold, highly related: non technical product manager
Vfn@reddit
I didn't catch from your point whether you and your team are doing scrum? A product owner is a role in scrum, and isn't always something you have a dedicated hire for. I've replied to all the items in the list to get a better understanding here. Most of what you're mentioning is NOT product owner work, but engineering work. Some manager work and some IC work.
Of course the lead of a project or a team (tech lead) is involved with triaging work, together with an engineering manager and a product representative if you're not working in a product company, then perhaps a sales person. Perhaps the tech lead role in your case is also a people manager role? In that case, yeah this is part of the job.
On what level? What does this mean? Choosing what work to do, or ensuring the team has fleshed out work ready for the next iteration/cycle/sprint? The latter is part of the job, the former is usually done with a product representative.
This confuses me. What does this mean? Do you find yourself often reprioritising work that has already been committed to (work is already on the Kanban board)? That sounds like a disaster in project planning.
Who else would be better suited to do this, than the tech lead? This is your responsibility. If there is too much, practice some delegation and talk with your engineering manager about mentoring other engineers in the team to do this work. It's IC engineer work to shape and reduce larger unknown work into smaller workable units (tickets) and align on upcoming work with the team.
This is engineering manager and tech lead collaboration work, not Product Owner work. You want to maintain a balance between being able to work on product work while not slowing down over technical debt. Part of the job.
This sounds like a bit of a red flag, if I understand it correctly. You would ideally commit to work that is important for the company first and foremost, way before it becomes part of the daily work. It's the engineering managers job to ensure the team is working on the most important thing at the current time, and the project lead's (tech lead) job to drive the day-to-day. So you should already have work that can be planned that should be approved by product and engineering manager.
Who is better suited than the lead? I think this is a shared responsibility with the team, but tech lead is a good candidate for this work. It is certainly not the product owner's job on their own.
Who would be better at this than the tech lead? This is part of the job as a senior-and-above role. Project management is incredibly important.
Technical strategy is VERY different work. It's about engineering organisational structure (how are teams formed, how many do we staff per team, do we have the correct roles, hiring, compensation...), how you shape your teams across the whole organisation, how you run large technical programs (think SOC2, ISO certification, technical compliance, GDPR), how engineering succeeds in the value stream, etc etc... None of it is in execution.
DevEx, DevOps, and generally operations is generally not found embedded within a team (unless there is enough talent and time). Most companies are centralising this work in a separate team, whose clients is the engineering org. So a centralised team will ensure we follow the correct practices for each team. They will concern themselves with ensuring infrastructure is working as intended when product/feature teams need new deployments to succeed. (etc etc...)
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions!
masone81@reddit (OP)
This helps a lot, thank you. I answered most of the questions elsewhere (not that I expect you to read all that). But I just wanted to say yes I acknowledge that some of this is at least partially the tech lead’s role, and I’m really fine with that. The main problem is that I feel like I’m shouldering the burden alone and would rather not be the primary driver of all of this.
But yeah, a possible solution for me would be to just make peace with all of this and try to be able to code maybe 25% of the time. Maybe that’s where I’ll head.
Vfn@reddit
You're very welcome! I would also like to say that leading every single project in a team is very taxing and maybe not something that is suited for long term happiness ;)
As a tech lead (or tech lead manager) you are probably spending about 70% of your time in the building phase (coding, reviewing, testing, deploying...). So if you're not able to get even 25%, that isn't great.
cballowe@reddit
Most of that sounds like tech lead work. A fair chunk sounds like work that a tech lead may partner with others to do - ex: coming up with priorities and estimates of the work needed tends to be where the TL and product people meet to discuss. "Hey, we think these features will take this much effort and these are bigger scope so if we put them first they push other things back, given that info, how would you like to prioritize" ends up being the discussion - they may look at the features and assume very different effort levels. Same for getting things to a state where they're actionable (especially if the team is pretty junior, but a senior engineer should be able to be told "work with this contact to refine this and do it" instead of you breaking the whole thing down first.)
The frustration around not getting answers on slack sounds like maybe that's only the primary communication from the dev team but it's not how your customers communicate, or they do but they only track some rooms and not the ones you're asking in. As TL, when you're seeing questions not being answered, it's your job to reach out and get answers on their terms. Or work with them to make sure there's clear channels for collaboration - I always keep dedicated channels between my teams and teams that support us, like various ops teams, as well as project specific channels with representative stake holders. Some work best by email, others by slack or similar, and some just need a weekly meeting on the calendar to go over any new status changes since last time.
The things you want to be doing are often done by steering others and not as hands on as you want. You can actually make lots of progress on devex stuff through mentoring and active code reviews. Starting a strategy doc doesn't need to be a big thing. Sometimes the most impactful is 2 pages banged out in an hour and passed off to someone else, or a proof of concept followed by a pitch to your team/manager and adding some tasks to the queue for your teammates to flesh out. (As an example, I spent a day writing a basic framework that would allow restructuring a complex config, did 3 example sections to demonstrate that it was better, then passed the rest of the team to complete - like 30 more sections. This helped them learn the new way while also getting the load off my plate and was a quality of life improvement overall as it made certain classes of misconfiguration easier to catch/hard to introduce.)
I bet if you scheduled a weekly 30 minute meeting with each of the stakeholders whose requests go through your team to focus on refining any of their requests that aren't yet clear, and maybe a bi-weekly meeting with all of them to prioritize what's ready, things would go pretty smoothly and it would take less of your time. Pack your Monday with the 30 minute ones or something.
cristiand90@reddit
I've been in a similar situation for a while. Our management decided to just make us a tech only team, no more "product" projects, only tech backlog/big picture/performance stuff.
So basically gave up on finding a suitable PO.
Will see how it goes.
weulerfilho@reddit
Is growing other engineers on the team to take on some of that work an option? For example do you have other senior eng on the team that could help to clarify the ticket requirements?
Still-Positive1107@reddit
I think they don’t need a product owner. They have you, and seems like you are doing an amazing job.
Call it product owner, management, whatever, you are keeping your team stick, protected and motivated.
If the lack of technical stuff bothers you, make sure you have someone you can offload “the product parts”.
Sounds to me you are doing fine. Keep it up.
masone81@reddit (OP)
I appreciate your encouragement. I’m borderline traumatized by the cruelty in most social media so it’s nice for someone to say something nice for a change. Ha ha.
I will say that I think my team enjoys working with me and they feel that I’m the wind that their backs. I enable them to be less distracted by the BS and focus on the fun parts of being an engineer.
I am seriously considering just accepting this for what it is, making sure that I can spend maybe 30% of my time coding, and filling this role that I’m halfway decent at. I think it may be the easiest way for me to move forward with my life and career at this company.
Another option is for me to ask for a new job where I’m only a senior dev, but I do like being involved with the leadership of the team. Like I said in another comment, I just don’t want to feel like I’m carrying the majority of the burden.
Still-Positive1107@reddit
I know, people sometimes mistake because there is anonymity you can say anything.
For me it sounds like your team morale will go down if you pursuit going back to dev. You moved to a Tech lead position, it would be a pitty to leave it behind for those PO things.
You should try to make it work for you. Ultimately if it doesn’t you can move to another place, every place is going to have their own problems. You will escape the PO issue and you will find suddenly something else. There is no perfect place.
Ultimately, the way I see it is that you are answering to a business problem and providing a solution. That’s for me is enough. You are making the product work.
The fact that your impact comes less from a technical side, it is what I would call a technical detail.
The same way it doesn’t matter in which language a microservice is built as long as it works, a little bit of the same philosophy applies here.
You are totally in your right to not feel comfortable with that. Go change it.
Personally, it wouldn’t matter to me as long as I am bringing value, but you should pursue your career goals.
Still-Positive1107@reddit
You sound to me a manager that I would like to work for. Maybe it is your thing?
On the other hand, you need to distribute the workload to free yourself for those task. I can spot that you can make the team split the tasks by themselves, for example. Add a ceremony or two of self reviewing between devs. Or once a week 20 mins to check that everything is in order (just a few ideas).
Seems to me that you are filling a manager hole. Pick one of your Devs to help you fill the tech lead one.
masone81@reddit (OP)
Yeah, I will admit that’s one of the problems here. I am pretty good at this stuff. But I don’t want to just “give in” and officially resign myself to management or product ownership. My greatest joy is building things by writing code. To give that up and be a Jira ticket jockey just seems so sad and not what I signed up for.
And then offloading some tech lead stuff to other engineers on the team has definitely happened already. I’m glad I have those strong engineers to lean on for the technical direction of the team and designing some core ways that the platform works. But I would like to be more involved in all of that, and I do have the skill to do so.
I could just request that I take a senior engineer role and stop being tech lead, but honestly, some of this leadership I really do want to be a part of. It would be hard for me to just sit back, wait for tickets. and watching the world burn around me. That’s not my personality.
Still-Positive1107@reddit
I understand. You will need to find someone to offload those “PO” tasks then. Someone made an excellent comment on how to approach it.
Going back to Dev sounds to me like a reactive move, not aligning with your real goals.
You”ll find your way. Sometimes you need to think about it or push it for later when you are “smarter” to make a move.
You have time, nobody rushes you. Take some fresh air, walk your dog, go to the gym, or any other activity you enjoy and keep on thinking about it next week.
yvetterowe@reddit
You describe it so accurate 🤣 Spending so much time managing timeline, backlog vs. building stuff. I feel a lot of tasks here actually fit in the responsibility of a TPM. I used to work in a team that has a TPM but honestly it also feels a bit odd to have a kinda “third-party” doing progress check-in without really knowing the technical context. But now doing all these things ourselves also feels draining. Dilemma lol
svvnguy@reddit
What you're describing is part of the job. Tech lead is probably the most difficult position precisely because you have to juggle so much stuff.
I'm sure there are others that have support personnel around, but that's not always the case.
Personally I think you have a pacing and (maybe) a delegation problem.
geekluv@reddit
I would start delegating out to your team a bit more. Once a quarter, have two people assigned (rotating) that will monitor the triage queue and production support. This helps disseminate that responsibility and knowledge-base over time.
You mentioned two boards (jira and kanban). Is kanban tied to the triage / production support? That goes to the rotating team.
Not sure how you assign stories to developers or how those stories get written but perhaps they should be in that process more, so it's not all on you.
How many of the agile ceremonies do you need, how useful are they, and how many are you doing because that's what people do. I would just evaluate those for usefulness
Lack of a PO and Scrum Master is tough and I would say to the team, "in lieu of those actual roles, we as a team have to absorb them", so developers need to be more active in working to remove blockers and also the team should be looking at the board and the deliverables as a group, as a whole, and not just concerned about their one ticket.
The largest concern I have with this scenario is what appears to be a lack of communication between this team and "The Business". That is something you should probably look to getting resolved by reaching out and finding your peer on that side. They should have an understanding of what you're delivering and what the roadmap looks like, etc. - it's bizarre that they don't.
In fact, whoever is saying "why didn’t you do X, Y, Z???” --- that's the person or persons you need to be scheduling meetings with to discuss the roadmap. Once you find that person you can work with on that side, they may be able to help with some of the other planning and communication issues you've described.
Happy to chat more if you'd like.
masone81@reddit (OP)
Thank you for your comments. This was very helpful. To answer your question, we use Jira as a Kanban board. We don’t do sprints yet, and we may never do them. We just move tickets from left to right through our process in order of priority.
To address some of your later points, I do think I could have done a better job collaborating with the analysts and business people where we technically get our work from. They are just so disengaged with the team though, and I hate to make special accommodations for those folks. They don’t read or participate in Slack, they don’t attend a lot of our meetings and when they do, they are silent with cameras off, they don’t read things I write and document carefully, even when I’m trying to design a feature that fills their needs. They just don’t engage and it’s hard for me to take it on myself to take the steps necessary to force their feedback.
geekluv@reddit
Happy to chat more if you like
It seems the people on the business care less than you do. This may be a symptom of the company, perhaps the product, or just them
Feel free to DM if you want to chat more, m really curious about this
No_Technician7058@reddit
i was in this situation. team lead; i was doing everything you have in your bulleted list and i was tired of it.
one thing i hate to break to you is your boss doesnt care. this is a you problem. no matter what you say, your boss wont hire for this role. even if they did, a PO may not help fix things either. accept this.
just stop doing these things. its only your problem because youve made it your problem. if you got another job, theyd be dysfunctional. so let them by dysfunctional now.
Resident-Athlete-268@reddit
So, as a Product Manager with big tech as well as startup experience here, the ‘product owner’ role is a bit outdated. The PM role changes substantially based on org size, but most tasks you’re describing should sit well within the dev team scope except for the ‘shaping’ and triaging of issues and maybe release management.
Product should be setting release targets and scope and the dev team should be managing the implementation process. Product should not typically have the bandwidth to run standup, agile ceremonies, etc unless they are not doing the job they are hired to do, which is primarily 1) assessing opportunities and 2) defining the product to be built.
I wouldn’t expect a dedicated product manager to solve all the things you listed, but your job would be significant easier if you’re building the right things. It does sound like you need to share out the sprint planning/ceremony process, some help with release/stakeholder management, and either a UX / design person or a better stakeholder engagement process.
midasgoldentouch@reddit
Do other engineering teams have a product owner? Are product or project managers a thing in your company? What is your manager? An engineering manager or a different role?
I think providing the answers to that will help a bit. Beyond that, the base answer is see where you can delegate more. Do you have to be the one shaping tickets, or can someone else do it? If you determine what the roadmap is for the next quarter, can someone else be responsible for prioritizing the tickets in the backlog/board? Can someone else be responsible for running retro? Etc etc.
masone81@reddit (OP)
There is a whole Product organization. They just don’t really participate in the running of the team. There are rumors that there are people that want to change that and have a more agile team model. We will see what happens. But the way it has historically been is that product organization just sends requirements over to the team and waits for things to be done.
Those product folks don’t know the names of the engineers on the team or even how many engineers we have. It’s not what I’m looking for.
Feroc@reddit
Letting it go without finding someone who is willing to pick it up probably won't work, at least it won't work well. Ideally you would hire a real PO, but quite often that's something that takes a lot of time.
But it seems that you are allowed to organize yourself, so it's something that you should figure out with your team in the meantime. Generate roles within your team and define responsibilities for those roles. Some responsibilities probably should be in the same role, others could be assigned to a different role. Then decide who should pick up what and go on from there.
I usually use some sort of delegation poker when we introduce a new person/role into the team.
masone81@reddit (OP)
Thank you for the feedback. Yeah a few others have suggested something similar, which basically boils down to, I need to delegate product owner tasks to other engineers on the team. To me this just exacerbates the problem. Now it’s multiple engineers that are distracted with product owner responsibilities instead of just me. What we need is a product owner to be the product owner. 😊
midKnightBrown59@reddit
Engineering manager?
alpacaMyToothbrush@reddit
Somehow the EMs at my company have figured out how to foist everything but HR off onto the tech leads. I was recently asked to apply for lead for a whopping 6k raise. I thought about it for a moment before deciding 'You know what, I'm good'
OneVillage3331@reddit
That’s the whole point. An EM will have several leads to manage by delegation. Yes an em is accountable for the outcomes too, but they will need to delegate IC work to engineers.
alpacaMyToothbrush@reddit
Eh, IMHO a tech lead is responsible for being the first line of defense for a project. That means he answers technical questions, he advises on future work, and maybe helps with grooming. My manager still attends our meetings, but he seems perfectly content just to listen in while our lead does all the grooming, the sprint planning, coordinating design discussions, etc. I have served as a lead on another team and I found that my work load basically doubled over sr dev, and it seemed to be a very thankless job.
This honestly leaves me wondering what my manager's actual job entails, as he seems to be simply a relay from upper management to us. I'm not explicitly calling him out or anything because he seems to be a genuinely nice guy, but management at this company seem to be way more hands off than I'm used to elsewhere and it feels like that burden is mostly shifted to the backs of the leads.
OneVillage3331@reddit
Absolutely on a project level, but you need to lead a team to lead a project. An engineering managers responsibility is to make sure you have the right people for the project, for several concurrent cross-team projects. Tech lead is single project, em is multi project. Em also handles a lot of comms, so tech lead has a single point of contact outside of immediate stakeholders.
masone81@reddit (OP)
We do have an engineering manager and he’s great. But we have a large team and he has a LOT of direct reports so he really does do a lot of straight people management. He steps in and helps with the PO stuff, especially the longer view stuff that I never think about from the trenches. Without him I’d drown.
inphamouse@reddit
If it’s as dire as you say it is, it’s the EMs responsibility to realign the work-load, and likely hire / promote a 2nd tech lead, split the teams, or work with leadership to reassign ownership to product managers, etc. You say your EM is great, but if you’re drowning, the EM needs to stabilize this situation - otherwise why have an EM at all?
If the EM is junior, you may need to coach them into this mindset, and provide them recommendations on how to improve the team and balance the workload.
hermesfelipe@reddit
You are the tech lead on a team that has developers who are technically stronger than you - the only reason I can think of that explains it is you are better on non-technical subjects. Being able to do what you are doing might be the reason you were chosen for the role. It looks to me there is a misalignment between your expectations and the actual need on that role. Before raising the issue to your leadership, I suggest you think about that: if your role was actually supposed to be doing what you want to be doing, would you still be the best option for the position?
masone81@reddit (OP)
You might be right, but I was specifically hired to come in and change the engineering culture of the team. It was all very waterfall and old school in a bad way. I was specifically hired to turn this into more of an agile team. And all of that teambuilding and process direction is something I had to influence first, and digging into the technical challenges came next. I may have just done too much of that first thing and made people too dependent on me.
serial_crusher@reddit
I'm a tech lead in the same boat. Some of it you just have to accept this is your life now.
There's something to be said for strategic failure. You let that stuff go and it turned into a shit show, which is the desired outcome. You want the business to see that somebody needs to be doing that job, and hopefully they'll see reason when you tell them you're not the person who should be doing it. It sounds like your boss will back you. You'll probably have to show more than 2 months of sustained failure before they'll start listening.
The key is you still have to do useful work and be productive in other visible areas, so they don't just throw you under the bus. Tackle tech debt and get your performance metrics up while new feature development stalls out.
masone81@reddit (OP)
This is useful advice and something I’ve definitely considered, thank you. The problem is that I actually do really care about the team and I want us to be successful. Also, I understand that it’s expected that the tech lead would do maybe 10 to 20% product ownership, or at least collaborate very tightly with the product owner. I have no problem with any of that. I want to be in some of the grooming meetings, I want to be consulted in advance for my technical opinion on upcoming features, I want to have a say in the prioritization of the backlog, especially when I need technical tickets to be prioritized, etc.
But I don’t want to have to drive all of this. I want to feel some wind at my back so it doesn’t feel like it’s all on my shoulders.
All that said, there probably is a strategy for me to let a lot of things go and see what happens.
keithfree@reddit
I feel your pain! Currently working with an organization that does PO by committee, and has horrid planning practices.
ancientweasel@reddit
Stop doing it.
1AMA-CAT-AMA@reddit
You aren't the tech lead. You're the PO + tech lead right now. It sounds like you either need to keep doing PO work as well as being a tech lead or convince your org to give you a PO so you can focus more on being a tech lead.
All the PO work, someone has to do and it sounds like your org is making you wear two hats.
masone81@reddit (OP)
Yes, that’s what is happening for sure
codespitter@reddit
That’s what I had to wait for. Still training the guy, but I have been moving everything off to my guy over the year. I also asked my boss for a smaller amount to cover, and that helped my PO have less to be trained on.
ruby_chicken_choker@reddit
I dealt with this shit for years. I finally shook it by switching positions. In hindsight, I wish I’d taken action and escalated on the product side and held them accountable to do their jobs.
aFqqw4GbkHs@reddit
100%. Sounds like you’re the PM or scrum master too … you’re doing like 3 different roles, which can’t be done well for a team that size. No way you should be leading Agile ceremonies with everything else on your plate! If you can’t get a real PO, at least try for a PM and a BA at least.
lurkatwork@reddit
this is a well played trope but: are you me? my team is only 5 but otherwise exact same situation. other teams at my company get a dedicated product person and for some reason we have one over three teams so all of that work falls to me. the only thing I don't do is performance reviews. I pick up small tickets to keep sane and deliver them weeks later because every day is eaten by meetings, reports, planning, discovery, and requirements
supyonamesjosh@reddit
For small teams this isn’t completely uncommon. I was this person for a small team at my last position.
The only problem is if that person doesn’t want to be that person.
lurkatwork@reddit
I don't mind playing this kind of role but we're just very uncoordinated. I sink a lot of time into plans that barely survive two weeks
supyonamesjosh@reddit
Yeah, its a different mindset. Usually you can plan longer than that in terms of business value but you have to be willing to adjust on the technical side.
The hardest part about it is it is two different ways of thinking.
corny_horse@reddit
Same, except I do performance reviews bi-annually and do hiring too. And chair several cross team committees.
PF_tmp@reddit
Depending on the product, with a team of 5 people you aren't going to have both a tech lead and a product owner. That's too much management and not enough workers. In a small team you have to wear several hats.
steveasher@reddit
In my experience, even just one person being able to bridge the gap between business and tech is a necessary requirement of success.
Karthi_wolf@reddit
Damn! I could’ve written this 🥲
Fast_Paper_6097@reddit
I used to be a hybrid TL/Scrum Master and was put on projects/pods with weak PO’s to help compliment the team and coach the PO. You have a skill, if you didn’t you wouldn’t be doing it. Embrace it, get certified at your employer’s expense and profit.
pipipopop@reddit
You can follow what my boss did. At first we have team lead and engineering manager, then the team lead left and the engineering manager stepped down to become a dev for some political reasons. My boss (CTO) decided since there's no team lead, everybody becomes a team lead. We take turn to become scrum master, on call, code reviews, own the feature and have meeting with other teams. Tbh I hate it but I guess he has no choice, he has so many things to care about.
PedanticProgarmer@reddit
A team without a lead will either deteriorate into apathy (I have seen that twice) or someone will take the informal leadership role. Don’t be that sucker. Leadership is a stressful job, you need to be compensated for the stress.
pipipopop@reddit
Exactly, that's why nobody wants to be a lead because we are not compensated for that
randomInterest92@reddit
Delegate aggressively so that eventually everyone is complaining and not just you.
The best way to delegate is to ask people first if they want to do "other" work. You'll be surprised that some devs want your job and if they do you can delegate a lot to them. This is a win win. You have to worry less about PO stuff and those devs who enjoy playing PO probably think they'll get promoted eventually or they simply enjoy it.
yabadabs13@reddit
Welcome to the club. Where I work many of the PMs are useless.
Fortune 20
Beneficial_Map6129@reddit
Why isn’t your manager doing this? Especially the agile ceremonies
masone81@reddit (OP)
He manages two other big teams this size. He has other important high level work to do and he isn’t as close to the day to day operations of this team. He’s very supportive and sees my pain here but we just don’t have any people willing or able to do this job. He says he’s working on it.
a_reply_to_a_post@reddit
who would be giving you the tickets? you're the tech lead, part of the suck of being a tech lead is getting in there early to groom work for the rest of the team
if you're missing requirements for a critical feature post-delivery, how long is your delivery cycle and can you take a more iterative approach and get incremental feedback?
it could be a culture thing at your company with product people but as a tech lead you gotta try and figure out how to get the questions you need answered from the people who can answer them with like, soft skills, or bribes
masone81@reddit (OP)
The PO would give us the tickets based on collaboration with our stakeholders in the broader organization. That didn’t happen when I stopped doing it.
Frozboz@reddit
In the past 5 years or so, I've been dealing with various degrees of this same problem as a tech lead. Others at my organization have as well as other friends. I'm beginning to see this as an industry trend more than anything else. I hate it.
edgmnt_net@reddit
Well, this is a reason why I was reluctant to take on a higher formal position on my team. Many of those things you can also suggest and do from a purely advisory position such as a senior IC as long as you can convince people. So unless this becomes a purely technical leadership position, I'm ok with having even less experienced people taking the lead.
DoughnutTurbulent830@reddit
Shouldn’t that be the responsibilities of the BA and Scrum Master? On my team they are usually doing all of those and triaging with the PO on what features they want completed for the next release
RandomDeveloper4U@reddit
Sounds like you’re being taken advantage of and willfully doing it. I watched my manager get put into this spot while my company hasn’t given inflation raises or promotions in nearly 2 years!
rjm101@reddit
My company believes they didn't need PO's so they got rid of them all. What they don't seem to realise is it just makes someone else the PO. For us it was the tech leads too. Luckily I think they've realised the mistake and they started hiring PO's again granted they aren't as hands on with specific teams anymore which is still a bit annoying.
Mestyo@reddit
I feel your pain.
I am in a very similar situation myself. Having people-skills while also being an experienced engineer and understandinging of "product"; it became natural for me to act as this bridge between product and engineering.
At first I thought that this was great, I get to make a real impact! While that is true, it has become abundantly clear over time that it's a thankless job where my efforts are either not noticed or credited to the PO.
Lately I've come to recognize the fault in my actions: I have turned myself into an invisible essential worker in the organisation, rather than help create good processes that actually help us in the long run.
I haven't been helping anyone, especially not myself. I have been obscuring the need for proper structure, and delaying the development of those structures.
We are currently in the process of changing this. What I feel like has really helped is having frequent grooming sessions, where we discuss the work to be done on a technical level. The goal is to concentrate discovery to those sessions and be able to work effectively. It's established that it's a perfectly acceptable outcome of these sessions to just determine that work needs more product input.
This process alone has made a huge difference to me. I can now confidently push work back, creating transparency around hidden complexity, placing ownership where it should be, and saving myself a lot of work to boot.
CommunicationGold868@reddit
Start a succession plan in your team. Pick the person to be your deputy / 2IC and start training them up to become a Tech Lead one day. This ensures you get the support you need, allows you to take leave, and gives you a choice for your own career development one day. There is some really good advice from others on this thread. Delegate as much as you can so you can run the team. Mentor your team to create their own stories. Sit and go through the design with the relevant team members and let them add AC on the ticket. You and your 2IC revise these AC together, so that your 2IC can do this on their own one day. Get your team to help watch comms and triage bugs. Ask for a BA, do they can get the initial requirements. Introduce a requirements document, that business have to sign off before work starts. Introduce a RFC (Request for Change) document for when business want changes. Add the risks of doing the work and the risks of not doing the work. Let business sign off and accept the risks for the decision that they make. Setup a regular meeting with the stakeholders so you can improve communication and build a relationship with them. Teach business the process that they need to follow for requesting things from your team.
SizzlerWA@reddit
There’s a saying - “As the money goes up, the fun goes down!” 😌
DeterminedQuokka@reddit
So I’m not even technically on a team and I do most of this for the team I work most closely with. If there is an additional manager that’s actually embedded in the team you can farm some of this out to them.
But even if you had a PO someone on the dev team would have to do triage, break down tickets, advocate for technical debt, monitor daily work, plan releases. None of those are things that POs have enough context on the technical side to do. All of our repeating agile at my company is also run by dev and my company actually has a pretty high ratio of PMs to devs. But we also advocated for that because the PM didn’t know enough about the technical system and it was harder to help her do it than do it alone. Although she chooses not to come, she could still if she wanted.
It sounds like what you actually want is to not be a tech lead. Which is 100% valid.
I agree with others that you should start delegating this stuff to your engineers. But a lot of tech leads will barely code, and you should actually be more support for people below you doing cool architecture to level them up.
I work at an extremely small company (the team I support is our entire backend team and it’s 3 people (including a manager), our front end team is fully contractors). And my job is actually technically to investigate new technology and prototype. I spend about 40-60% of my time planning things. 30% doing glue work. 10% basically poking things to see if I can get them to cost less money. The rest of it is mentoring/monitoring other engineers. And like I said I’m not even the lead of the team, when I was 80% of my time was spent managing the team, but I hired a tech lead to do that for me (he does about half of it by my estimation). Like once a quarter I spend a week or two on actually digging into something to determine if it’s feasible and abandon him to fully run the team. If it is feasible I hand it off to someone else and provide support.
When I was at a larger company 400 devs. I was a senior level engineer and spent 50% of my time managing the team I was on 40% writing documentation of systems and teaching people how to use them and 10% of time coding. This was the correct ratio at that company.
You have unfortunately leveled out of doing the fun stuff at many coding jobs.
Hot-Claim-501@reddit
Better TechLead wearing PO and PM hats, then PO or PM telling devs how to implement things.
But seriously, you need to learn how to delegate. Not just simply left har alonw hopping that someone pick it up.I have worked with team, that scrum master ans jira keeper roles were carried on by any team member. Same thing in the other team was "PO assistant". Important, you are rotating hats, so level of discomfort is moderate and non permanent. Don't forget to praise publicly a lot of any such helper.
But before assigning it, the team needs to have honest conversation and come to the ideas, that happy business is betterthann unhappy, groomed tickets better than undefined, organised backlog helps everyone. You got the idea. Moreover, your manager already gave you hint. You need to find working solution.
LogicRaven_@reddit
Looks like you are doing a great job navigating the team among goals.
The drawbacks are your unhappiness and that no one feels any pain or see the need to change.
What is the business impact of the delay? Which higher level manager's OKRs/KPIs are delayed?
You could sum up what happened and how having a PO would have avoided that. You could add what else the team could deliver more on if a PO was available.
Shop around with that summary - start with your manager, then with the leaders whose goals got delayed.
UncleSkippy@reddit
Talk to your boss again. Tell them you're going to step away from that role again and let them know what happened last time you did that. Send email(s) to them reflecting this as well for your own personal documentation.
Then step away and do NOT pick up the slack if things go south.
Now the ball is in their court. If things fall apart again, it is on them, not you.
meevis_kahuna@reddit
This is what I'd do in as an IC if I didn't give a shit as to what happens with my team. I don't know if it's good advice for a lead. I think the key is to delegate.
UncleSkippy@reddit
Absolutely! The problem is that it is currently delegation by default though. It isn't OP's responsibility to figure out how to delegate product ownership if he isn't supposed to be making product ownership decisions per title and job description. That is his boss's job. If they offer to make it part of his job description with a pay and/or title bump, then that's a different story.
meevis_kahuna@reddit
Makes sense to me!
Ok-Repeat-8130@reddit
Bro same
meevis_kahuna@reddit
Suggestions: - Document exactly how much time these non-technical activities are taking - Track instances of missed requirements or communication failures - Calculate the opportunity cost of technical improvements not being made - Gather examples of similar-sized companies/teams and their typical structure
Then present to your boss: - The current situation is creating business risk (missed requirements, delayed features) - Technical debt is accumulating due to lack of technical leadership time - Propose a clear separation of duties between: * Product Owner (product vision, requirements, prioritization) * Scrum Master (ceremonies, process, impediment removal) * Tech Lead (technical strategy, architecture, code quality)
In the meantime, you could: - Set up more formal requirement gathering processes rather than relying on Slack - Schedule regular stakeholder meetings to prevent communication gaps - Consider if one of the senior developers could take on some technical leadership tasks. - Look into whether you need a Scrum Master as much as or more than a PO
roger_ducky@reddit
I know this is an issue, but your boss is semi-right. Except, you have to make it your boss’s problem.
If your boss isn’t high enough on the totem pole, then the boss should pass the message on to the next person in the chain of command.
I agree with u/meevis_kahuna though. The more data you can collect about the miscommunications and time spent not implementing stuff needed, the more likely someone in the chain will care enough to do something.
twelfthmoose@reddit
Short of leaving or having some magic PO land in your lap this is definitely the right direction.
I can’t see a Scrum Master helping much here UnLess they are focused on coaching leadership about how to be more agile (eg actually have iterative feedback , and support the dev team).
I will go a little bit less scientific and indirect and a little more direct … for example if you calculate that you spend 80% of your time doing this, your boss might not think that’s a problem.
Some strategies that I wish I would have employed in your situation : - Set up a very strict practice for acceptance, criteria of tickets/stories prior to even getting into the backlog. To be honest, I tried this and it didn’t work lol create your own list of devs/technical debt backlog items, and working on only that for a month - Take one month leave… -
saposapot@reddit
Who’s your boss and what’s is role?
Does your title actually mean the things you want to do or it’s you dream scenario? Maybe the organization had a different idea?
If you want to keep going it seems you need to be in charge of this: hire assistants to do what you don’t think is your role to do.
I would say the majority of it is really Product owner. Some things could also be assigned to a scrum master that you can promote from within the team.
Just talk to your bosses, see how other teams work in your organization and propose a team structure that makes sense to you.
If they don’t give the resources to do this, then it’s another story.
diablo1128@reddit
I worked at a company where I was promoted in to a "Software Team Lead" role. The role was sold as I could still code, but in reality it was a manager role were responsibilities were similar to what you are experience. From managements perspective if I still wanted to code I would pass off this other work to people under me, but that's not how it works in the real world to have a happy team.
Honestly I just sucked it up and embraced the role instead of coding and it was not so bad for me. If you don't want to do that then you need to have a conversation with your boss and follow up on the plan to get where you need to be. Failure to change probably means you should look for anew job that better aligns with what you want to do.
Honestly I would have handed this by getting the answer we need to more forwards and failure to do that would mean I would not schedule the work. I would have got people in an actual meetings to discuss the issues blocking to team from doing priority work instead of relying on slack.
I didn't give a shit though and had no problem being late or not delivering when we didn't know what we needed to do. If I were to get fired then I saw it as it is what it is and just let it go. I saw my job as shielding the team and getting all the information they need to do their work properly. If that means I'm in a lot of meetings then so be it.
wwww4all@reddit
It's just a job.
2itb0x@reddit
Your frustration is valid and common for anyone stepping into a role that is misaligned with what they would rather be doing.
How you want to address it does boil down to what you want to do. Do you want to stay in the organization and just do what interests you?
Try talking to your manager and be as direct as you can be. Something along the lines of: "I appreciate the opportunity to lead a team but I want to be honest about what kind of role I would like to play in the organization that better aligns with my interests".
If they don't budge, then you can try doing a couple things that may help with "surviving".
Full Disclosure: I've worked as a Lead in a role similar to yours and currently manage multiple teams that run a similar strategy. I'm completely open to any questions you may have.
It sounds like your organization places a lot of responsibilities on those with a Lead title. Do you have any flexibility with how your team runs your daily rituals? Can this be a shared responsibility so it's not entirely on you? There are plenty of ways to rotate some of these responsibilities with other Engineers too. Taking turns each sprint or designating other engineers as leads for appropriate projects are some of the ways that we've shared those responsibilities before. Depending on your team's culture, there may even be individuals on your team that would love the opportunity.
If you still want a Product Owner to help you, there's one last thing that I'll say. I can say from experience that even if you do collaborate with a Product Owner, it takes a significant amount of investment to onboard a Product Owner to absorb any of the responsibilities you've described. You will almost always play some role in this process, and if it's not you then someone else on the Engineering team. It gets even more complicated if roles / responsibilities are not clearly defined and that Product Owner does not report directly to anyone in your department's hierarchy.
mental-chaos@reddit
I think your manager's advice of "let that stuff go so someone else can step in" is good but incomplete. Don't just let that stuff go, find someone else out of the other 9 engineers to take some of those duties to give you some more room to breathe (potentially ask your manager for input on who that someone is). Don't burn yourself out.
wowzuzz@reddit
My advice to you is this. Don't put too much into it as they will want more and more and more. Do what you need to do. Be a solid contributor, but don't kill yourself. If they don't care enough to help you manage the workload then why should you give a shit? Honestly ask yourself that. It sounds like you are doing too much. I would ask for a substantial pay raise to reflect your responsibilities. If not taken under consideration, then consider moving on or doing the bare minimum and do other forms of 1099 work. Two can play that game.
No_Perspective_3733@reddit
Get a different job.