The ultimate checklist to becoming a development team leader

The article describes a practical checklist for developers who want to move from individual contributor to team leader. It says the shift depends on showing domain knowledge, handling production work, helping onboard others, managing large tasks, and taking part in important meetings.

Reading notes

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• Deliver heavily in the team’s domain by writing code across services and business flows, starting with small tasks to build breadth and quick wins.
• Learn production work through profiling, log tracing, testing in production, incident mitigation, shadowing oncall, and handling bugs before they become incidents.
• Answer support questions from other teams to deepen knowledge of the team’s area and become a knowledge focal point.
• Help onboard new teammates by answering questions, explaining company and team processes, and learning when to let others struggle a bit before stepping in.
• Practice large-task work by collecting requirements, shaping designs, handling dependencies, breaking work into smaller tasks, estimating time, and leaving buffer for unknowns.
• Lead a big task on your own by preparing the design, talking to other teams, setting estimates, and pushing the work forward.
• Lead other teams technically on a big task when possible, since this is presented as a strong sign of readiness for team lead.
• Participate in meetings such as design reviews and technical consultations, and learn from people who run complex meetings well, with mentorship as a useful path.