What is technical leadership

At its core, technical leadership encompasses several aspects:

• Vision and strategy, such as setting the technical direction for the project, defining goals, and making crucial technical decisions.
• Team management, such as building a strong, cohesive team, motivating individuals, and fostering collaboration.
• Technical expertise, such as possessing deep knowledge of the technologies involved and solving complex technical problems.
• Communication, such as communicating technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Mentorship, such as guiding and nurturing the growth of team members, sharing knowledge, and fostering a learning culture.

What is the difference between people leadership and technical leadership?

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These two forms of leadership share common ground in motivating and guiding others, but there are key distinctions:

People leadership:

• Focuses on emphasizing interpersonal relationships, building trust, and fostering a positive work environment.
• Requires emotional intelligence, communication, conflict resolution, and team-building skills.

Example: Motivating an HR team, building feedback channels with employees, and managing team dynamics.

Technical leadership:

• Focus: Driving technical success, making sound technical decisions, and navigating the complexities of the project.
• Requires deep technical expertise, problem-solving, decision-making skills, and the ability to translate complex concepts into actionable plans.

Example: Choosing the right technology stack, resolving critical bugs, and guiding the team through technical challenges.

What skills should a technical leader have?

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Let's break down the core technical leadership skills, splitting all skills into 3 major categories.

Leadership skills

• Problem-solving: Identify and resolve issues facing teams.
• Crisis response: Respond to communication breakdowns, project hurdles, or issues calmly and effectively.
• Team management: Resolve conflicts and encourage cooperation with inclusive leadership.
• Giving and receiving feedback: Provide empathetic feedback on teams' work and accept constructive feedback.
• Facilitating communication: Take stakeholder and team input into account to foster dialogue.

Technical skills

• Performance optimization: Stay updated on industry trends, domain knowledge, and infrastructure to improve team performance.
• System maintenance: Use and maintain version control, security, database, and cloud systems.
• Resource management: Ensure teams stay on time and within budget.
• Reviews: Review teams' work to ensure it meets technical standards or when a technical problem requires expertise.
• Development: Play a role in coding, engineering, and development.
• Continuous improvement and delivery: Familiarity with CI/CD tools and practices for automating building, testing, and deploying apps.
• Prototyping and tooling: Ability to rapidly prototype ideas or solutions and experience with tools streamlining this process.

Soft skills:

• Resilience: Lead teams through challenging development cycles.
• Innovative thinking: Find out-of-the-box solutions to problems.
• Open-mindedness: Be willing to consider other points of view.
• Empathy: Consider team members' feelings and perspectives.
• Open communication: Proactively communicate frequently with teams.
• Organization: Prioritize tasks when managing multiple responsibilities.
• Action/solution-oriented: Actively seek solutions when challenges arise.