2012 - My First Leadership Experience
In 2012, I had the change to build an agile development team to work on several projects while I was in college.
Professional contacts
I used to work on some projects as a freelancer, but since I was busy with my work and college, I started to refusing them.
During the same time, some of my colleagues in college were starting to look for their first professional experiences and I was thinking that it might have been a good professional opportunity.
While talking to a close colleague, I told him that I had several projects to work on as a freelancer, but I didn't have enough time to work on them. If he, and others colleague, would like to help me, we could work together.
Going full-time
I used to work very far from my college, and after thinking about the opportunity I had and also taking to my manager, I decided to work solely on the freelance work I had.
I end up having 7 colleagues that accepted to studied most relevant technologies at the time so we would work on the real projects later.
Training the workforce
All the experience I had with training from the previous years paid-off. I have training them basic frontend development, agile principles, ruby and ruby on rails. That was all we had to learn so we could start working on real projects.
Real projects
We have developed projects for clients and professional contacts I had a the time. In the beginning, things was a bit slower as you can image, we were getting better and faster overtime.
At the end, I my work would consisted of helping other with the features that needed to be implemented, answering technical questions, removing blockers, providing feedback, doing retrospectives, running daily meetings. Everything the teams needed to work batter.
Good training
Some people, after the training, have passed and various hiring process and they unfortunately have left the team. They we glad and happy for everything but it was time for them to move on.
And I learned a very important lesson with that day: "What if we train them and they leave? What if we don't… and they stay?".
Wrapping up
That was how I got into leadership and how I was able to train, lead, mentor and manage my first team of software developers. I was able to use all the skills I had learned from my previous experiences to build an agile development team.
Regards,
Renan de Azevedo
Updated at 2020/06/26 12:53.