Notes on leading a 5-10 person engineering team
Code review, task allocation, performance reviews - the small habits that kept the YooTek team shipping without burning out.
Leading a 5-10 person team is the awkward middle. The team is too big to wing it and too small for layered processes. The patterns below are what worked for me at YooTek.
Code review is the main feedback loop
A small team without dedicated EM time relies on code review for almost all engineering feedback. I started doing two reviews a day on every PR I touched, with concrete suggestions and short rationale. It compounds.
Pair task allocation with growth
- Give the boring tickets to the experienced engineers - they finish quickly and unblock the team.
- Give the stretch tickets to the juniors, with a co-author from the senior side.
- Rotate the "tedious but important" work so nobody owns it forever.
The job of a tech lead is to make the team faster than the sum of its engineers.