What are good performance indicators for a Technical Team Lead?

Question

Closely related to this question, I'm in the middle of putting together my Key Performance Indicators for the new year but could use some fresh ideas.

What are some good candidates for performance objectives as a Technical Team Lead? Obviously there will be the technical code-related ones (which are discussed in the above-referenced post), but what about the broader leadership, strategic, technical design and other skills?

Answer 1

I had a mentoring objective once, it was related to number of people I train so that, eventually they can solve most problems independently. This was a about mentoring 2 recent school graduates. Another one could be maintaing proper documentation. Under leadership, KPI's could be introducing new processes within your team, rolling out CMM level processes as a part of broader company strategy etc.

Answer 2

A few ideas that come to mind:

• Feared - Is the team lead feared or other negative reactions from those on the team?
• Respected - What do those under the team lead think?
• Conflict - Is the team constantly dealing with in-fighting or has the new lead brought peace and calm to the team?
• Project results - Are projects finished within budget of both money and time? How good is the quality upon completion? Note that this may or may not be code-based work as there can be support as well as development parts to this.
• Communication - How quickly does the lead get back to people? How effectively does the lead communicate with other teams?

There may be other personality characteristics that seem to be the first few words people use to describe this person that could also be useful.

Answer 3

A couple more:

• Delegation ability - Do they delegate tasks to the right people and is the rest of the team happy with the work/engagement level that they are getting?
• Knowledge spread - Does the team badly suffer when certain individuals are not around (holiday etc)? Are all team members getting adequate exposure to all parts of the system (i.e. related again to distribution of tasks and support)?

Answer 4

Here are some suggested performance metrics, but I’d be cautious about pinning all of them on the technical lead in one review cycle.

• Improvement in team productivity, as measured by team velocity or time-to-release of features.
• Positive results from peer reviews, which cover technical knowledge, communication skills, leadership, coaching and decisiveness.
• Positive results from client satisfaction surveys of features implemented.
• Improvements resulting from new technology insertion, which was recommended by the technical lead.
• Changes in development process that result in fewer bugs or critical bugs released to production. (Ex. Introduction of TDD, code reviews, automated testing, etc.)
• Scalable designs that take into account clients’ future enhancement requests.