Leading a Development Team
Lead a development team from plan to running software: run its method well, ship often and safely, keep production healthy, and stop work that has stopped making sense.
- For
- Development team leads, new or about to be
- Assumes
- You've worked on a development team. No formal project management training needed.
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Stage 1 · Foundations
What delivery is
What every project does whatever its method, and the bias that undermines them all.
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Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)
The six activities every project performs, whatever the method calls them. Scrum and Kanban in the next stage are two ways of arranging them.
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Plan Continuation Bias: Why We Keep Building the Wrong Thing
The argument under the rest of the path: every method assumes someone will notice when the plan is wrong and stop. Usually nobody does.
Go deeper Choosing an SDLC Methodology
Stage 2 · Basics
Scrum and Kanban
The two methods most teams run, as they're defined rather than as they tend to drift.
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Scrum Methodology
The most common framework, as its guide defines it rather than as teams usually run it.
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Kanban Methodology
Flow instead of timeboxes, with WIP limits as the whole mechanism, applied to the process you already have.
Go deeper Shape Up Methodology Shaped Kanban: Complete Features, Not Sprints Extreme Programming (XP) Methodology SDLC Methodology Selection Guide SDLC Diagrams
Stage 3 · Intermediate
Delivering continuously
Getting changes to production often and safely, so feedback arrives while it can still change the plan.
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DevOps Methodology
DevOps as a change in who is accountable for running software, not a toolchain.
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CI/CD: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
The pipeline that makes frequent delivery safe, and where each kind of test belongs in it.
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Deployment Strategies
How a release reaches users with a controlled blast radius, and how it's rolled back.
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Package Updates Are Investments, Not Hygiene Tasks
Dependency upgrades carry their own delivery risk, and the lead sets how the team treats them: as investments with a reason, not hygiene to automate away.
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When a Trusted Dependency Becomes a Silent Killer
The cost of skipping that reasoning once: a trusted SDK upgrade passed a full regression and deadlocked under production load.
Go deeper Deployment Strategy Comparison DevSecOps: Integrating Security into Development Why Configuration Files Don't Belong With Your Code
Stage 4 · Intermediate
Keeping production healthy
Knowing when what the team shipped is hurting users, keeping failures contained, and leading the response when they aren't.
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Observability Is Authored, Not Installed
The argument for this stage: a team can only see what its code reports, so observability is a standard the lead sets for the code, not a tool the team buys.
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Observability Fundamentals
What logs, metrics, and traces each show and miss, so the team instruments once and can follow one request through the whole system.
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SLOs and Alerting
Turns 'reliable enough' into a number the team and the business agree on, and pages people only when users are being hurt.
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Reliability Patterns
Timeouts, retries, and circuit breakers are what keep one failing dependency from taking the service down, and what to look for when reviewing any remote call.
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Why the Fastest Incident Responders Slow Down First
Leading an incident: slow down, reproduce, and change one thing at a time, even under war-room pressure.
Go deeper Performance Engineering Disaster Recovery Patterns Observability Architecture Incident Response and Recovery Observability Diagrams
Stage 5 · Advanced
Leading the team
Leading the people who deliver, and speaking for their work to the business.
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What Engineering Leaders Ask That Others Don't
Five questions that separate leaders from people who hold the title. Read them before the how-to.
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How Weak Leaders Weaponize Empowerment
Control dressed up as empowerment, in the forms a new lead is most likely to slip into, and how to refuse them.
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Dev Team Leadership
The day-to-day of leading a team, from 1:1s and iterations to missed deadlines and incidents.
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Why 'Tech Debt' Does Not Get Fixed
Why the fixes your team needs rarely get funded, and the vocabulary that gets them prioritized.
Go deeper Team Architecture & Organization Architecture Leadership Single-Minded Focus Atrophies Everything Else