Why Your Agile Team is Still Failing: The Officer-NCO Rift Between Team and Tech Leads
For Part 3 of this series (See links for Part 1 and Part 2), we get to the heart of the matter. Now that all the roles are assigned and everyone has a clear idea of how the team should work, everything should work perfectly? Maybe, but also maybe not.
Let’s get to everyone’s favorite or least favorite business topic, communication. On a scrum team all the usual rules of business communication are true, overcommunicate, be clear and concise and a whole heap of others that you can get from any paper.
Team leads/Product Owners or whatever they are being called on your team, have a critical role that we see consistently done poorly. They oversee what the military calls, the ‘up and out’. Team leads need to protect the team from the outside world. Examples include scheduling, getting access to platforms, doing preliminary work for integrations, everything that spills up and out of the team, is their job. Besides the vision, this may be the most important and useful feature of the team lead. It vastly reduces the cognitive load for the development team and allows the team to move quickly knowing that their team lead will handle the items that encroach in on the team.
But why is this in the communication section? Because of the other half of this coin, which is the technical lead part of this dance.
The technical lead takes care of the ‘down and in’. Examples include ticket assignments, code reviews, internal team timelines, resource planning, and everything else that exists strictly inside the team. When people think of development this is what they are thinking of, but this part cannot work well and effectively without the team lead’s part and vice vera.
And this is where communication is key. Team leads and tech leads need to meet in the middle so that the ‘up and out’ meets the ‘down and in’. The arena they meet in is the daily scrum meeting and this is where the magic happens for strong teams. Here things can be prioritized and acted on quickly because everyone is in their lane and working together to get the team to change direction quickly and effectively.
This relationship is an extremely specific professional one, and one that is steeped in implication. In almost every power dynamic between team lead and tech lead, the team lead holds the advantage, as they interact with the business and function as the ‘face’ of the team. In reality, they cannot function effectively without the tech lead.
The closest relationship that it reminds me of is how my military friends used to describe the relationship between an officer and a senior non-commissioned officer (NCO). I will try to show the parallels below. As a disclaimer, I have never been in the military, so all my ‘experience’ is secondhand from friends and family who have served.
NCO/Technical Lead | Officer/Team Lead |
Interfaces with team directly | Interfaces with team through NCO/Tech lead |
Reviews the technical details (the how) | Reviews goals (the what) |
Selected from their peers to lead the tactics | Is brought on to lead the team with separate training/skill set |
Team structure places them lower in the chain of command | Team structure places them higher in the chain of command |
Deals with internal team assignments and reviews | Protects the team from outside influences |
The best functioning teams have both of those people realizing that they cannot function effectively without the other person and can work together to solve an ever-changing business landscape. When one group oversteps into the other group, the team stops knowing who to turn to for guidance and the ‘dance’ becomes jerky and uncoordinated.
If this is something that would be of interest to you, please reach out to us today and get in touch.
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