View source for Technical leaders as coaches, mentors and community leaders

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== Description ==
Technical leaders should view their role as building teams' technical capability over technical design, delivery and decision-making. Technical leaders are encouraged to reduce the proportion of telling and directing, and instead act as coaches and mentors. In addition, they should catalyse group learning to engage and share the diversity of experiences and ideas across teams.

== Rationale ==

* Motivation, engagement and empowerment of team members will be increased
* Raising the quality of technical capability will improve the quality of technical design and implementation
* Reducing the bottleneck of design and decisions having to go through leaders will improve the flow of value delivery
* The value creation potential of the teams will be increased

=== Relevance at Scale ===
At scale, traditional management dogma would suggest that technical leaders move to being managers, often with a title such "head of" their specialty (e.g. head of development, head of testing etc.). At scale, we need to:

# Maximise team autonomy
# while ensuring teams align with one other where necessary (e.g. architecture, end-to-end testing, UX ...)
# and ensuring teams learn from one another

As a result, the role of technical leaders at scale should focus on facilitating this alignment and learning (through coaching, mentoring and facilitating group learning).

==Related Principles==

*[[Product solution design is driven from within development teams]]
*[[Invest in quality]]