6 Interview Questions For Agile Tech Leads

Every team needs a leader to set direction, help organize work, clarify requirements, and resolve conflicts. Agile teams usually have a designated technical person or team leader who is responsible for leading the technical implementation. This role is independent from Product Owner and Scrum Master, but often works alongside them.

Key technology roles in an agile team include partnering with product owners to understand customer needs, prioritize backlogs, and review user stories. This person makes agile teams more productive by evaluating user stories, prioritizing work, completing development to acceptance criteria, and releasing strong releases.

This role requires the technical know-how to lead a team to optimize solutions, set implementation goals and prioritize technical debt. Most importantly, this role requires collaboration and leadership skills to support teams in new software development and continuous improvement.

Often, developers and development engineers are promoted internally to technical leadership roles after demonstrating the necessary technical and leadership skills. In some cases, organizations may opt for an external recruitment process and you may be interviewed for this important position. An agile technical team leader can become a delivery manager and CTO, so it's an important step in an engineering career. Becoming a technical leader is an opportunity to demonstrate your ability to lead a team and produce results.

As an interviewer, you can ask a series of key questions to assess a candidate's qualifications for a senior technical position. These are the main topics and questions that the candidate should prepare beforehand.

1. Collaborate with customers and business partners

While the duties of an agile technology leader focus on leading teams and providing technology capabilities, candidates must also demonstrate their ability to collaborate with customers and business partners. Bridget Poulos, Bionic's senior director of global talent marketing, believes technology leaders need to be prepared to answer questions about how they work with their marketing partners. Questions in this area may include:

• Who are the customers and key players in the customer interaction technology you are developing?
• When working on internal employee applications, how can you best understand your target end users and their workflow, data, and automation needs?
• What steps do you take when you launch a new application or technology, and who do you work with to ensure user adoption and specific business outcomes?

Organizations need detailed answers that show how the candidate communicates with people, understands business needs and interacts with stakeholders. "Applicants need to know how they collaborate with the company's organization, how they handle the technical aspects of the job, and how they connect the job to the business," says Poulos.

2. Solving technical problems

A technical director must be able to find solutions to technical problems. More important perhaps is the skill to hold discussions with the team and allow them to come up with solutions. When the team presents a solution, can the technology lead explain it to product owners and stakeholders without going into technical and implementation details?

Hackajob CEO Mark Chaffee suggests asking, "Can you describe a difficult technical problem you encountered on a previous project, how you handled it, and what was the result?"

The strength of starting with open questions is that it will be easier for the interviewee to demonstrate their knowledge and demonstrate their leadership style. "Interviewers need to know the candidate's technical knowledge, problem solving, communication, leadership and teamwork skills, as well as learning and adapting skills," says Chaffee.

Chaffe continued. “A strong response must demonstrate a clear understanding of the problem, problem-solving approach, decision-making skills, results, learning, and influence. Candidates should avoid vague descriptions, neglect teamwork, blame others, or just not think."

Once the interviewer understands the candidate's problem solving skills, they can proceed by asking them to solve problems in their technical area. “This forces candidates to think outside the box and apply practical solutions to real problems. It also makes it easier to understand whether your problem-solving skills are a good fit for your organization," said Josh Lemon, director of Uptycs' Managed Response and Detection Group.

3. Review code and correct architectural deviations

The third set of questions must exclude technical knowledge and meet position expectations. The responsibilities of a technical lead can vary widely between organizations and teams: some expect a technical lead to code with the team, while others expect them to act as solution architects.

Simon Matheson, EDB's vice president of engineering, recommends using a simple test to assess programming skills. "Before the interview, we used a simple and deliberate coding test," he says. "An accepted application, which will take an hour or two to complete, gives us the opportunity to discuss and assess during the interview how the candidate codes, solves problems and communicates."

Matheson said the test is not just about technical skills, but how a candidate plans to develop. “The question I want to ask is, how do you scale an app so it doesn't work for one person, but millions of people? This is a good test of how they approach complexity, what technologies they are familiar with or interested in, and how they think about crossing organizational and command boundaries. This is often the factor that separates strong programmers from technology leaders.”

Even if technical leads don't write code, they should have the knowledge, skills, and tactics to do code reviews. Organizations should consider asking candidates how they conduct code and performance reviews, what tools they use, how often they do them, what they look for, what determines code quality, and how they notify teammates when they need to improve the code. they. Skills. As a candidate, you must prepare well for this series of questions.

Semaphore CI/CD co-founder Marko Anastasov suggests asking questions that demonstrate the candidate's ability to think about different architectures and implementations. He suggests asking candidates to discuss trade-offs between, say, a monolithic architecture and a microservices architecture. Interviewers should select an area of ​​architecture that is relevant to their project.

"The answer is not to place one architecture over another," he said. "The response provided, which balances the pros and cons of each, shows that the candidate knows that there is no silver bullet for software development and that each project has its own unique needs."

Other examples of questions might include choosing between SQL and other database technologies, development observability approaches, and minimum requirements for documenting application architecture.

4. Team collaboration and agile practice

The Agile Manifesto lists people and interactions around processes and tools as a core value. One of the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto states: "The team reflects on how to be more effective periodically and then adjusts its behavior." These values ​​and principles speak to the role of the technical team leader, making them a great topic to discuss during an interview. I propose the following questions:

• What is your approach to working and interacting with people, especially when the team is geographically dispersed or supports agile, hybrid work practices?
• What agile processes and tool configurations do you consider minimal and non-negotiable with your team? How do you handle situations when teammates are not playing?
• When do you use retrospectives and how do you translate what you learn into continuous improvement?

Emily Arnott, content marketing manager at Blameless, suggests going a step further and asking yourself:

While training may be needed to recognize burnout, team leaders should take steps to thank hard-working team members and prioritize stress-reducing activities.

"More and more companies want their leaders to participate in creating social agility within their teams by planning to keep them motivated and relieve stress," says Arnott.

Several other interview questions along these lines.

• How can you thank your teammates and have fun with them?
• What steps would you take if you thought your teammates were running low?
• How do you respond to overly demanding stakeholders who are unhappy with the team's performance?

5. Ensure reliable and safe launch

Even when stakeholders are satisfied with the team's work, technology leaders always feel the need to release more features faster. Does tech communication succumb to the pressure and release faulty code and unstable versions? How can interviewers assess whether a potential candidate is following best practices, including continuous testing, feature tagging, canary release strategies, and left-hand security practices?

Steve Sill, Senior Technical Recruiter at LaunchDarkly, recommends asking the following questions: "How do you reduce risk when it comes time to launch your project?"

These open-ended questions allow candidates to demonstrate their established release management practices and their approach to balancing speed and security.

“If the answer is short, I will ask them to explain it to me because I need real detail and understanding,” said Seal.

I recommend the following clarifying questions:

• How do you know that the app meets quality standards?
• What security techniques and tools should every developer on your team know?
• What options would you recommend when implementing a major update to a critical application used by thousands of customers and employees?

6. Personal development and learning goals

One of the best practices is to end the interview by asking the candidate about their goals and aspirations. Lemon suggests asking candidates where they want to be in two years, terms people will have no problem answering. When asking about two years, candidates should look beyond short-term goals and avoid questions about long-term goals that people might not want to disclose at the first meeting.

“Don't be upset if you don't want to stay in the position you're applying for, because it also shows that the candidate isn't afraid to be transparent,” advises Lemon.

A simpler approach is to ask candidates about their learning and development goals. Ask the candidate what they have learned in the past year and what their goals are for the coming year. If they take courses, get certified, or attend conferences, that's great, but I want more. Who is your mentor? What hard lessons are learned at work? What books do they read and what podcasts do they listen to regularly? More importantly, how do they apply what they learn?

What you are trying to find out from your answer is whether the engineer is more than just a team leader and looking for a career. This candidate seeks to make an impact, lead a team to sustainable long-term success, and set high standards for themselves. Your personal and learning goals should show how you translate your goals into roadmaps and weekly events that support the role and responsibilities of a technology leader.

Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.

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