Essential Roles within Development Teams
Encapsulating all of the critical responsibilities in three key personas
In order to discuss how high-functioning organizations operate, I first need to outline the key players involved. I will begin by describing what I view as the most essential roles on any development team: the tech lead, engineering manager, and product manager. It’s possible (but highly unlikely) that a single person can fill all three roles. Someone must be fulfilling all of the responsibilities of each role on any given team at any given time; otherwise the team is likely to be underperforming, mismanaged, liability-producing, or otherwise toxic to an organization in some fashion.
While directors and VP-level executives have a broad scope of responsibilities, ultimately the organizations which they manage are collections of teams and chief among their responsibilities is to simply ensure that all teams are staffed with these roles and individuals are held accountable for the responsibilities of their roles. This demands a deep understanding of these roles and how they contribute to high functioning teams.
The most common failure modes for teams and organizations are:
A team is not explicitly staffed or insufficiently resourced for one or more roles.
Upper management (i.e. “tier two” director level and above) are not holding staff accountable for all of their role’s responsibilities.
This is basic stuff, but it’s incredible common that companies get it wrong. Before we can get to anything more nuanced or sophisticated we have to have a shared understanding of the basics. My hope in sharing these outlines is simply to do my own part in socializing the genuine essentiality of these roles and related responsibilities.
At some point in the long history of sailing, it became apparent that for any non-trivial passage, a ship required certain dedicated roles if it had any hopes of making the voyage. Minimally, a captain, navigator, engineer, and cook. And so here we find ourselves in the still nascent age of technology, finding the words to describe the people we must have alongside ourselves if we are to have any hope of building the cathedrals of the future.