This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic.

Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility.

This is useful for a couple reasons. One is that it helps you get more concrete about what leading a team involves; for new managers, having an exhaustive list of job responsibilities is helpful to make sure you’re tracking all of them.

More importantly, though, we often want to somehow split these responsibilities between people. Team leadership covers a huge array of things—as you can see from how long this post is—and trying to find someone who can be great at all of them is often a unicorn hunt. Even if you do find someone good-enough at all of them, they [...]

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Outline:

(01:04) Categories

(01:07) Overall direction

(02:50) People management

(05:03) Project management

(07:13) Technical leadership

(09:00) Example divisions of responsibility

(09:11) The “tech lead manager”

(10:23) Engineering manager / tech lead

(11:20) Product manager / tech lead

(13:15) People manager / research lead

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First published:
July 22nd, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yRhhGpxQwKekmo4bJ/categories-of-leadership-on-technical-teams

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Categories of leadership on technical teams” by benkuhn

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Categories of leadership on technical teams” by benkuhn