Development team leads on mentoring within Touchtribe

Team backend: Ezra

Our backend lead Ezra runs full time on development projects himself. In addition to building backend systems with the team, he interacts with colleagues on a daily basis. His team lead role consists of two goals: making sure everyone is comfortable and conveying the company's values to colleagues. 

The purpose of a team lead

"Basically, every day you have these two goals in mind," Ezra explains. "You think about processes, contact between colleagues, who is doing what and whether you have challenges within the team. Since you want all your colleagues to feel good about themselves, I talk to them a lot. Sometimes you have to ask a few more questions to really hear how things are. In addition, I am sort of the middleman between the developers and management. My goal is to always put the interests of the colleagues first. Management decisions have to be positive for everyone, of course. The advantage is that as a developer you also have technical knowledge, so you can imagine well what your colleagues might be concerned about."

Coaching colleagues

In addition, Ezra discusses with all colleagues their growth path. What technical or soft skills do they want to learn? What can they do to step up a 'level'. "Perhaps most importantly, once a month we have an informal walk around with everyone. This is where you not only talk about work, but also how someone is doing in their personal life. That way you know what really concerns people. In this chat we also talk about the growth plan. There is also a daily backend standup with all colleagues and we host knowledge meetings every two weeks. This way we share knowledge and there are plenty of contact moments."

Ezra's career path at Touchtribe

"I have been working at Touchtribe for 5.5 years now and have always been very involved with every layer of the organization. You know all the colleagues well, even within Makerstreet Development, which we are part of together with Elements and Webflight. Because I always try to improve processes, I slowly grew into this position. I always had the ambition to help colleagues so it was a logical step for me. Even after 5.5 years I am still enjoying it. The concept of Makerstreet with its different specialized agencies is very interesting and you immediately have a lot of collaboration with design and marketing professionals. Guiding colleagues who already have a good spirit is just great. They always want to achieve great results and put in their best efforts. This combination works really well for me!"

Team frontend: Maarten

Team lead Maarten was a fulltime developer, but since his move to team lead he has been less concerned with developing. He is mainly concerned with determining the Way of Working, processes within projects and organization of project managers, for example.

Matching processes with colleagues

Maarten: "Sometimes it matters less how we do something, as long as it is defined as a team and everyone is moving in the same direction. Ultimately the developers have to execute it so they have the most important voice in the process. The most important thing is the whole team agrees with the way things work and developers can do their job as well as possible. You actually have to match processes with your colleagues and not impose processes on your colleagues. Is something not working? Then we change it, as long as we agree with each other. With 32 colleagues, this can be challenging. This is why we are in the process of training more team leads.

From application to growth path

From the very first moment, Maarten is involved in hiring new colleagues. "Often I am involved from the very first moment in recruitment. This allows me to see if someone fits in the team and to estimate in advance what guidance a new hire needs. During the first week I always have an introduction interview. That way a new colleague has a familiar face right away. In the team they have a buddy who really shows them the practical things and takes care of the onboarding. I am mainly involved in the further development of people and keep myself busy providing courses and knowledge sessions".

Maarten's path at Touchtribe

"When the previous team lead left, I was put forward by him. I have been team lead before, so I thought it was a nice move. The most important thing for me is that I always want to help people and share my knowledge. That way I contribute to every project without developing too much myself. Because I do have years of development experience and am working with the knowledge of colleagues, I do have enough knowledge to speak with. My great passion lies in the process, not necessarily in the technology itself. Programming is still a big hobby of mine and in my spare time I do spend a lot of time on it. With work I mainly hear a lot of things and I am busy with issues and processes", Maarten says. "The most enjoyable thing about my work is the people. Everyone wants to learn and especially to teach other people something. That way everyone continues to grow, which is the purpose of my lead role".

Working at Touchtribe

Besides a lot of nice colleagues and the best guidance from one of these leads, you also get a lot of cool projects at Touchtribe. Want to know more about these projects and what it's like to work with us? Check out our projects here, read the blogs of colleagues Bart and Syakirah or check out the vacancies on our work for us site.

Do you have any questions? Let us know at jobs@touchtribe.nl and who knows, you might soon meet Ezra or Maarten.