What kind of R&D team lead does your product team have?
A quick guide to recognizing different leadership styles in R&D and their effect on your product’s success
Product teams come in all shapes and sizes. They are usually composed of a product manager, product designer, and an R&D team. At larger companies, it's also common to have a product analyst and UX writer. One factor that separates a good product team from a bad one is the R&D team lead.
Not all R&D team leads are hands-on. While that can be helpful, it's not always necessary. What's critical is their mindset.
The Different Mindsets of R&D Team Leads
The Executioner
This lead doesn’t dive into the details. Their focus is on making sure tasks are estimated, and the team delivers what they committed to—no questions asked.
Details-Oriented
This type of lead digs deep into every task. Everything must be airtight before the team will even consider it for a sprint.
Business-Oriented
This is rare, but when you find it, it makes for the best leaders. Business-oriented leads bring two key advantages:
They offer valuable input on tasks and their priority, asking not just how and why, but whether it will make the most impact.
They create a more motivated team. Many R&D teams work just to finish the sprint, regardless of what happens once the product is released. A business-oriented lead helps the team care about the results of what they’ve developed.
Hands-On Mentality
Some leads also make sure to do a bit of coding. It's important that they don’t do too much—not because they can’t, but because it can create unnecessary noise for the individual contributors (ICs). Dev team leads handle a lot of triaging, so it's crucial they leave enough time for that.
The Triager
This lead focuses on managing incoming tasks, bugs, questions, and high-level meetings. They reduce context-switching for the team and minimize time-wasting by handling most of the big decisions and high-level calls.
Final Thoughts
I’ve worked with many R&D team leads, and I’ve seen that different teams need different types of leaders. But what I’ve come to realize is that the best R&D teams have a lead with a good mix of traits, especially if they are business-oriented. This mix benefits the product by adding another layer of thinking to prioritization. Of course, this depends on how the product manager operates—there are many types of PMs too!
For the development team, having a lead who’s engaged in the business side helps them care about more than just the technical side. They’ll raise concerns and offer feedback that benefits the entire business, not just their code.