My Thoughts on Being the Front-End Team Leader

Introduction

Hello. I am Chris, a front-end developer in the Global Development Division at KINTO Technologies. I have written about Storybook and Vue.js, but today, I would like to move away from technology a little, and talk about management.
Actually, I became the leader of the front-end team in July of last year, and it's been almost a year since then. It has been my first leadership experience and a many things happened, but I wanted to think about how I can become a better one for next year, look back on what I have done as one over the past year, and set it all down in writing. So, I decided to write this article about it.

About the Team

First, going back to when I became the team leader last year, the team itself was created when the department reorganized and we wanted a unit that specialized in front-end development. As I mentioned in a previous article, we are a multinational team with some members who are not that fluent in Japanese, so we communicate in basic English within the team.
The main job of this team is to do the front-end development for each project that belongs to the Global Development Division, but since there are not many members in relation to the multiple products involved, it is not uncommon for one person to be responsible for several of them. Also, since there are no front-end tasks for products that have entered their maintenance period, we sometimes improve the code by refactoring it, and at the same time rotate team members to other products.

Role as the Team Leader

Before I became the team leader, I used to focus on front-end development work and develop the design system as a member of this team. However, since becoming the leader, I have mainly focused on the following tasks, and have often left the development work to the other members rather than doing it myself.

Selecting technologies and implementation methods
The first task is to select the technologies and implementation methods for the team as a whole. There are many frameworks and libraries to choose from for front-end development. In fact, there are so many to choose from that I imagine lots of people probably struggle to decide—and I am one of them, of course. When it comes to frameworks, you have to consider things like whether the team members are used to it, whether it meets the product requirements in terms of functionality, and whether the community support is adequate. However, another important factor is how to strike a balance with developers’ common tendency to want to try out trending frameworks, too.
Currently, the front-end team in the Global Development Division is basically uniformly using Vue.js/Nuxt.js, but that does not mean that we will have to continue using this set indefinitely. The team always has an atmosphere of wanting to try new things, so recently, inspired by other front-end teams at in-house tech staff get-togethers, we have been trying out and assessing things like SvelteKit and Astro as well. Then, we decide what to use based on the results of our assessments.

Communication and following up between PMs and team members, and reviewing product code
The second task is to ensure that product managers (PdMs) / project managers (PjMs) and team members can communicate smoothly. Since the front-end team sometimes does development tasks for multiple products, I get the members to stay in communication with the respective PdM/PjM as they go. Through things like checking specifications, making suggestions, and giving feedback, I help ensure that product development can go smoothly. In addition, since there is often only one team member assigned to each current product, as the leader, I review all the products in order to understand their quality situation and other information about them.

Serving as a bridge between senior managers and team members
The third task is to serve as a bridge between senior managers and team members. In our company, becoming a manager can sometimes mean having more than 10 extra members under you. For example, in my case, my own direct manager also manages other teams, and is in charge of nearly 20 members in total. Consequently, management of team members is often done via their leader.
Currently I mainly do the following:

• Set roles and missions for each member based on their abilities and aspirations (of course, ultimately coordinate with the manager)
• Based on the missions we have decided for them, I set up regular 1-on-1 with them, give them feedback, listen to their concerns and the things they want to discuss, and feed the on-site opinions back to the manager as necessary

Motivating and mentoring
Lastly, of course, managing the team members. As mentioned above, in addition to one-on-one communication, discovering each team member's strengths and making the most of them is also an important role. My team members not only have various nationalities but various skill levels as well. However, one thing they all share is they are highly ambitious. Some of them pay tremendous attention to detail and spot things that are difficult to notice, while others study in their private time then use the skills and knowledge thus gained in their work. It is also necessary to maintain motivation, and I want to help team members achieve their goals as much as possible, but even when that is not possible, communication to motivate them is necessary.
Also, if team members need to use a technology that is new to them, I will, for example, give them a lecture on it, or—if it is new to me as well—study it together with them.

What I Want to Be Mindful of as a Leader

Appropriate communication and following up
With working remotely on the rise since the COVID-19 pandemic, our company has also introduced a full-flextime system and a remote-work system. This in turn means more meetings held online. Compared to talking face-to-face, it is harder to pick up information from facial expressions and gestures, and there is a higher risk of communication errors. In particular, when I mainly want to talk to the team members as their leader and for one-on-ones requested by them, as far as possible, I choose times when everyone concerned is in the office. (Of course, we keep the meetings themselves to a minimum.)
Also, I won the hackathon held in the department last year and am working with another team to turn my creation into a product. So, I also regret not being able to rapidly follow up with my own members due to doing two jobs, and am now looking for a way to balance things better.

Delegating and nurturing well
My team works on multiple products, so when assigning members to them, I try to take into account their skill levels and preferences, how difficult the product is, what the issues are, and so on.
Then, even after assigning them, I regularly talk to them about the situation and provide them with support. Sometimes when I look at team members’ tasks, I feel a strong desire to do them myself as well. However, I do my best to put my own feelings aside and get the members to do them :->.
On the other hand, even after leaving tasks to them, I still have to think about what I can do to help them grow as well. One of my answers is to encourage them to think for themselves as much as possible. For example, in the case of junior-level members, when I want to point out something in a review, first, I ask them questions to get them to think about the “why” part, rather than thinking about everything from scratch.

Conclusion

Being a leader for a year has brought me a lot of experiences, and I would like to wrap up this article by talking about what might lie in store for the Global Group’s front-end team this fiscal year.

Updating our skills in the FE field
As I mentioned above, in addition to the team still having some junior-level members, the technologies keep changing day after day. The past few years have seen lots of hot new frameworks in just the front-end field alone. Notable examples are Svelte, Astro, and Qwik, all of which other departments are using.
Introducing a new framework or library entails thinking about more than just the technical factors, but studying up on those as well will prove useful in the future, and broaden your horizons to boot. So, I would like to set some vague annual goals for the members and update their skills as a team.

Understanding the BE field
A common tale from my own experience is that specializing solely in the front-end and having little understanding of the back-end can lead to mismatches in discussion about API integration. So, even though our company separates the front-end work from the back-end in terms of job descriptions, I would like my team to learn as much of the basics as possible in areas their own work does not cover, too. For example, one of the measures I am doing now is to coordinate with the project leaders after assigning members to projects, so that they get to experience handling simple back-end tasks as well, at a level that will not be a nuisance to anyone.