How do you lead a team of developers?

Exo — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 09:12:39 +0000

Let me start off...

...by saying that im in a kind of "weird" situation right now i would say, thats why im writing this.

I've been working at a company as a full stack web developer for almost 3 years now.
My company consists of different departments. We have our database engineers, thats one department, then we've got our Wordpress-dudes in another department and lastly the Webdev Department which im part of. We've got like 7-8 employees working in the database-engineer department, then we've got 7 employees working in the webdev department, including me and lastly 3 employees in the wordpress department.

Now to my situation

I'm supposed to be the "teamleader" now for the webdev AND the wordpress department. Don't get me wrong, i know my way around Wordpress even tho i don't like it that much from a developers point of view (sorry dear wordpress developers) and i also did some theme and plugin development over my last few years, so wordpress is not the issue itself.

My "issues" are coming from another end:

First of all, it's my first time being a teamleader for anything businessrelated.
Second of all, my company is in sort of a weird transition right now, when it comes down to projectmanagement. Since i've joined the company they have been managing their projects in a waterfall-model type which i really dont like. Not only because its an sort of outdated way of projectmanagement, also because we have alot of projects where the estimated effort turns out to be way more at the end, ending in the customer being sort of angry and the team being pissed because they have to implement yet another feature which wasnt in the planning right from the beginning but is wished by the customer or hasn't been seen from the beginning. Everything is sort of transitioning more into an a pseudo-agile direction now with people wanting kanban boards, daily scrum meetings, sprints and so on. I also know my way around Scrum and developing agile, i also visited a scrum schooling and have a certificate for that so thats also not the problem. I also know all the issues about companies not being able to transition from waterfall to agile development because of several reasons and all that.

I don't want to completely fail as a teamleader, also i dont really know what to do first. I want the team to transition to a more scrum-like or agile-like development style simply because i see alot of improvements there on one side, but on the other side i dont see us actually being able to do that because of our financial/commercial management being someone who only wants to hear numbers and doesnt care about the rest. i also see some other parts of the upper management not having the mindset for us actually being an agile team and end up like this:

How would you approach this situation? Do you mighty-teamleaders have some things you could give me on my way through this journey? What would you do or not do in my situation? Any question?

DEV Community: Exo

How do you lead a team of developers?

Let me start off...

Now to my situation

My "issues" are coming from another end: