It's All About Leadership

The role of the technical lead has radically changed over the last several years. It used to be the technical lead was about being the senior developer on a team that made sure the code was getting written. You were the individual who knew the most about the technology stack you wrote the applications with.

This talk will look at the ten most common traits needed for leadership and will look at how they can be applied to yourself or other technical leads in your team.

The role of the technical lead has radically changed over the last several years. It used to be the technical lead was about being the senior developer on a team that made sure the code was getting written. You were the individual who knew the most about the technology stack you wrote the applications with.

However, as projects have gotten larger, technical leads now have to deal with such things as offshore development teams, more complex projects and shorter delivery times, the role of a technical lead has now shifted from being less about technology and more about leadership. Many of us have been on projects where the technical leadership was the critical inflection point between success and failure.

This talk will look at the ten most common traits needed for leadership and will look at how they can be applied to yourself or other technical leads in your team. The talk will cover such topics as communication, planning and working through people problems. We will also talk about how you as a technical leader can remain relevant in our fast-paced field.

Audience: This talk is geared towards new and existing technical leaders. This talk will include very little technology and non-leads might find this talk not directly useful to their day-to-day work.

About John Carnell

John Carnell is the manager of Platform Engineering for Thrivent Financial, a Fortune 500 financial services company. In addition, John is a prolific speaker and writer. He has spoken at national conferences, such as Internet Expo, the Data Warehousing Institute, and numerous No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums.

John has authored, coauthored, and been a technical reviewer for a number of technical books and industry publications. His latest book, Pro Apache Struts with Ajax, was published in late 2006.

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