
Ask HN: How to be a good technical team leader - alicorn
Those of you, who have been promoted from senior dev &#x2F; architect roles to team leads or product owners - can you point me to some good resources or give some experience-based advice about how to successfully lead a dev team, and how to stay on a good enough level of technical knowledge to evaluate solution  proposals while retaining sanity?<p>Background: I started at my current job 2 years ago and quickly moved up from dev to architecture. As time goes by, I get more and more involved in high level discussions about our products and need to delegate almost everything that is not talking, listening and doing powerpoints to &#x27;my team&#x27; (I decide what they are doing day-to-day, but I do not have recruitment or budget responsibilities) which currently consists of 10 people, but will soon double in size.
I am not overexcited about this, as I would have liked to spend more time understanding nitty gritty technical details, poc coding and having fun with solving problems, but in our current situation there is nobody else who can take my role.<p>Problem is, I consider myself to be bad with people. I am female (my team is exclusively male), and neurodivergent, and while I have reasonable general social skills, I feel like I need a lot more data to know how to handle various situations, especially not-happy-path. I understand that nothing replaces hands-on experience, but any advice is highly appreciated.
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machtesh
Have no fear. With a bit of commitment and practice, you can learn to be
really good with your people. Just a few key actionable skills can turn you
into a great team leader. In addition to telling and reminding your people to
do things, make sure you PRAISE in one way or another, after they have done
what you asked them.

Here’s something I wrote recently on the key tips to becoming a great team
leader: [https://blog.leadingup.co/almost-everything-weve-learned-
in-...](https://blog.leadingup.co/almost-everything-weve-learned-in-30-years-
of-leadership-coaching/)

But, there's only so much reading online can help. You mentioned that you
don't know how to handle various situations. You need situation specific
advice, not general. To me that sounds like a management/leadership coach. We
run an unlimited coaching service for people exactly like you:
[https://leadingup.co/](https://leadingup.co/) or email me: aaron@leadingup.co

Hope we can help you!

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croo
I may have just the book for you. The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders
Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier is a great book with lots of
examples on how to be a manager in tech. She structured her book very
sistematically in a way from junior developer all the way up to CTO. On each
level she talks about the job description, the hardships to endure and how to
solve them.

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thekhatribharat
A couple of points:

1\. Provide developers with convincing reasons for important product
decisions.

2\. Developers do not like to be led by someone they think isn't technically
capable. Being a smart rubber duck for the team works in most discussions, and
when niche technologies are presented, you can always buy time to read up on
it before greenlighting solutions.

3\. Be proactive in resolving internal team conflicts, in an amicable and
respectful fashion.

