Building the team

Our squad built two of Leonardo's biggest features, Flow State and Blueprints. I was the frontend tech lead, looking after four engineers: two mid-level and two senior.

Rather than handing out tickets, I split each feature into sections and gave every section a champion. That's one engineer who leads the piece and pulls others in to help.

Being a champion meant owning it from start to finish. They ran the technical kickoff, took their questions to product and design, planned the work and broke it into tasks in Jira, and then delivered it. Once it shipped it was still theirs, so they kept an eye out for bugs and ways to make it better.

My job changed too. I spent less time deciding who does what and more time coaching: helping someone through their first kickoff, talking a plan through with them, and backing them on the calls that were theirs to make.

We shipped both features. And by the time I left, one of the mid-level engineers had grown into a senior engineer.