The Technical Lead’s Dangerous Dip into Prioritization Politics
In the last blog post (see part 1), I tried to share my experiences and insights drawn from our Stone scrum team interactions with Team Leads and the most common issues with how they are setup to succeed and, sometimes, setup to fail.
In this blog post I would like to address another piece of the scrum team, the technical manager. The person that gets the second most attention on most teams is the Technical Lead/Engineering Manager/Technical Designer/Architect. All these titles for the someone who is going to decide the of any product. These wonderful minds are going to solve your problems, if you take the time to treat them right.
“I have our new objectives for Quarter 1, here’s the list,” the team leader announces during a refinement, a Miro board shared to the entire team.
“We have 3 large T-shirt size items and 2 mediums, that was what we agreed to, right?” they hope they have done a good job and not bit off more than the team can chew.
The technical lead looks at the list thoughtfully, waiting a beat to take it all in.
“We did, but looking at the requirements next to the post it notes, those two ‘mediums’ are now ‘larges’, someone else with more back-end experience speak up, that’s just my guess,” the technical lead looks around scrum call.
“I agree, those last two items on the post it note can be a whole new post it by itself,” the back-end developer adds.
“Team Lead, we should descope at least one of them. Leaving them both in would put the team over capacity.” The technical lead says, standing with their teams assessment and making the final recommendation.
The example is a vastly over-simplified for this type of conversation, but it shows the technical lead demonstrating clear communication to the team leads. What the technical lead did not do was select what work will stay or go, overstepping into the stakeholder management process and prioritization. They have stated that the added details have changed the estimate of work and reviewed that estimate live with one of the team members. They stayed focused on the ‘how’ and communicating the ‘how’. The team feels supported that their technical lead is supporting them and the team lead has been given clear guidance.
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