I'm currently a first-time Tech Lead at about the 1.5 year mark of a 20 person bootstrapped start, with our tech team being 6 people excluding myself (1 Flutter Dev, 2 Server-side Devs, 2 Web Devs, and 1 QA).
The startup is a fairly ambitious product that has many different technological pieces that all tie into each other, and mostly has each individual developer working on their "own" project. It feels much less of a team, as it does just people working on their own sections of a the product (we have a mobile app project, 2 web projects, and a server-side automation project going on concurrently right now).
Overall, I've been very pleased and impressed with how much we've been able to get done over the last 1.5 years since I've joined, the business team seems to be very pleased in general with our ability to ship.
I'm starting to feel burned out trying to keep on top of it all, while managing expectations and the literally daily discussion of roadmaps +6 months away. Although we haven't had turnover issues or anything like that, I feel like I haven't been able to be as good of a manager to my people as I would like to be (giving detailed thought into their career progress and detailed advice on how they could continue to improve the day-to-day).
I've tried to implement the "Shape Up" method a couple of times, but its always immediately turned into a tool to plan a year out, with detailed features in each "iteration". They've been open to the idea of "not everything they plan for will make it into the iteration", but that just means that it gets moved to the next iteration, which kind of defeats the purpose.
I would say my main strength (and interest) is being able to actually deliver a project at a time. I think I could be extremely effective on a small feature team. What stresses me out is feeling like I need to do that on all 4 projects concurrently and the constant discussion with the business team about all of them, and any idea they have about them for the next 12 months.
- If I'm being totally honest, I'm feeling like going back to being just a Senior Engineer would be perfect for me right now (but doesn't seem realistic from where I stand today)
I'm currently wondering if a Engineering Manager with project management skills would helpful to take that piece of it off of my plate.
- My fear, with this, though is that the Engineering Manager would just become a 1-1 proxy and I'd still have to be managing most of it anyway
Thanks for any advice in advance!
What exactly is the issue that makes you feel burned out? It looks to me that is the constant meetings and discussion about roadmap and stuff like that, were you're inquired about all statuses all the time.
Why do the business team feel the need to discuss this so much? Do you have lots of stuff changing in the roadmap in those discussions? Do they inquire you a lot about status? Do the tasks status change a lot between those meetings? Do they change what the team focus should be? If is useless talk, then you need to assert yourself and say that you need less meetings to have more time to work. If they keep changing, then really they need to learn how to focus on something. Then you should talk to them the need to focus. If is just status that they want, then you can start making some documents that has the status updated and just share with them.
This isn't a developer issue or a project issue, but people's issue. And Business people issue even, one of the worst.
In one project i worked, there was always a Project Manager that would be talking to the business. They would always share the status of the tasks, talk about future plans and stuff like that. Them would filter the needed info to send to me, the tech lead of the project and we discuss what was needed. It was so much easier than talking to the client itself.
For me, it looks like you need someone like this. It doesnt have to be a engineer or a developer, but someone with people skills that hold the business bullshit to get to you and your team. Leaving you to be focused on the projects. We devs like to shit on Project Managers, but a good Project Manager can help a lot in cases like this.
I know you said that you're feeling overwhelmed with working on those 4 projects concurrently, but you also talked about them with a lot of pride and it seems that the teams and the projects are running well.
What you complained the most is about the meetings. Meetings with the business team. Getting someone to handle them for you will make wonders