Teamlead or team leader, what skills do you need

What an IT Team Leader Should Do: Roles, Responsibilities, and Skills. What skills does a team leader or teamlead need?

• Team leader or teamlead: a specialist who manages a team of developers. This is a job, not a profession. You can’t take courses and become a team leader. The only way is to gain experience and develop professional skills. A teamlead or team leader leads the development team. He doesn’t usually write code (although he could), nor does he think about architecture (although he could).
• Team leader: Communicates with customers or business units of the company. Estimates tasks, terms of each stage, divides them into sprints. Distribute the workload among developers. Makes sure tasks are completed on time. Evaluates developer decisions and makes recommendations. Coordinate the finished work with the client. The team leader is responsible for the entire project.

If deadlines are not met: the team leader is to blame. If you want to add more features, talk to your team leader. He is also responsible for team building, onboarding, and maintaining a work atmosphere. Load may vary.

What skills does a team leader or teamlead need?

In some companies, team leaders close the entire developer hiring cycle, from finding and interviewing to onboarding and mentoring. In other companies, team leaders connect only at the final interview stage with the candidate and decide whether or not to issue an offer.

It largely depends on the team leader whether the developers will grow professionally. There are many ways to solve this problem: do a code review, discuss it in one-on-one or general meetings, and engage in pair programming. With good team management, young people grow quickly. Bad bosses grind for months and don’t understand how their work helps the business.

What skills does a team leader need?

The position of a team leader is at the intersection of development and management. Therefore, businesses expect powerful hard and soft skills from him. 3-5 years of work experience, desirable to include experience managing at least a small team.

Experience doing code reviews, mentoring, because you’ll have to help other developers, make young people thrive. The ability to make decisions and take responsibility: everything that happens with the project becomes a headache for the team leader.

• Analytical skills and critical thinking: For the correct evaluation of the complexity of the task, prioritization.
• Delegation skills: to competently distribute tasks among team members.
• Knowledge of human resources: You need to understand the personnel policy, because you will definitely have to be involved in team building and recruiting. The ability to motivate employees and generally communicate with people, including conflict prevention.
• Time management: to set realistic deadlines for solving problems. The team leader must be an expert in the material used by the team. You don’t have to be the best at everything, it’s just not possible. But in case of force majeure, the leader must be able to replace any member of the team at least to the level of maintaining the viability of the project.