The next career step for a software engineer at Byldd is to become a project lead. The project lead position is a combination of technical and managerial position, about 65% and 35% respectively. It has several additional responsibilities beyond the responsibilities of a full-stack engineer.

Project Leads perform all the duties of full-stack engineering in addition to organizing and guiding their teams. They set objectives and targets for their projects and organize resources to achieve those targets.

So how does a FSE get promoted to Project Lead?

It is a three step process.

Step 1. Demonstrate that you possess the necessary attributes and attitude necessary to be come a project lead. See the Good PM / Bad PM post for more information about what kind of behavior is expected.

Step 2. After demonstrating responsibility, ask for the opportunity to lead the development of a single key feature within a large project. In this step, you'll primarily be focusing on being the technical leader for the project.

Step 3. The final step in the process is to manage and deliver an independent small project successfully. This requires the candidate to be both the technical leader and to maintain the relationship with our customer.

Candidates must display the attitude and responsibility that go with the PL role before they are considered for it. Here are the characteristics of Project Leads and it is what we look for in PL candidates.

  1. They must have the right attitude. Project leads are fully responsible for their projects. That includes delivering on time, delivering in budget and assuring a high level of quality in line with the Byldd standard. PLs take ownership and are responsible for their teams performance. They do not assign blame or make excuses.
  2. They are intensely passionate about doing good, high quality work for the sake of doing good work. Discipline is important to them and they don't take shortcuts at the expense of quality. Project Leads hold themselves and their teams to high standards of quality.
  3. They think before they act. They put time and effort into thinking through edge cases, backward compatibility issues and other potential problems before a single line of code is written. They care about user experience and make it a point that whatever they produce is easy to understand and use for their intended user.
  4. Finally, and definitely not least, they are excellent communicators and know their audience well. They are able to confidently speak to founders in a business context and to engineers in technical contexts. Excellent communication skills are necessary for understanding and converting founder's domain expertise into technical specifications for engineers to execute on.

Are you working at Byldd and want to be considered for a PL role? Ask for an evaluation.

Are you a founder and want amazing project leads to help build your project? Reach out to us to chat.