Tech Director

To be eligible you are at AE for at least 6 months but ideally 1y+

Each Tech Director will be assigned 5-6 projects. The time commitment per project is expected to be on average 5 hours per week, but will likely heavily vary week to week. The only real responsibility of the Tech Director is to make sure that the projects they are advising are successful. Outlined here are general guidelines about how to do that, but ultimately this is the only thing that matters and the Tech Director has (within reason) autonomy to decide how to best accomplish this. Project success is defined as the client being happy with our work and the deliverable we are creating being of sufficient quality and appropriate for the task at hand. The Tech Director is accountable for technical decisions and implementation not being the cause of project failure and is also responsible for identifying other areas of risk (project management, design, product strategy, client relations, etc.) and relaying this to the Head of Project Success (you should ask to check who this person currently is). Some things that are useful to ensure project success: Introduce other checklists/templates/one off processes to the team at the appropriate time in the project lifecycle. These should be documented here in the handbook. Attend all and sometimes run PCI meetings for project. Attend some agile process meetings for project to gain enough context to be an effective advisor. Oversee all high-level technical decisions to make sure there isn’t anything ridiculous going on and the team is practicing product-focused development. Act as a resource to the tech lead & PM to advise, think through problems, collaborate, do one-off research spikes, etc. Although the tech lead & PM should be doing the bulk of the work for the project and are responsible for making decisions that will make the project go well, the tech advisor is ultimately accountable for ensuring that they don’t do anything stupid. The Tech Director is empowered to do whatever is necessary to ensure this. Ideally, this can be accomplished through mentoring and collaboration, but if absolutely necessary and as a last resort, the Tech Director has authority to overrule technical decisions made by tech lead & PM. Help not only make good technical decisions but also help them be communicated appropriately with an emphasis on articulating trade-offs and why this is the best decision right now given the available information and constraints. Ensure these decisions are documented (most likely in slack) so that the rationale can be referenced down the road if any problems arise. Review what team members are working on (consulting pivotal and harvest) to identify underperforming team members and work more closely with them to help them get better. Also provide guidance to PM if their task delegation is not utilizing the team the most effectively (ex: a developer who is not very good at CSS is being assigned a lot of UI tasks). Do some PR reviews. Identify when there are critical moments for projects where extra effort would make a larger difference to project success and devote more time there. This can include more hands-on work, such as coding on a project that has an important deadline coming up or where velocity has been slipping, doing a POC or research spike to investigate an important decision, or working on small elements of delight for a client where that may make a significant difference in client satisfaction. Bring in additional AE team members who have a relevant experience where their guidance or a small amount of their help might make the project significantly more efficient. Consult with Head of Project Success if this will involve a >2 hour time commitment from them to get okay for allocations. Review current budget utilization compared to initial PO and identify when projects may be off track and take steps to correct this (help speed up velocity, encourage PM to discuss descoping with client, identify ways to simplify future features, bring up issue so AM can potentially secure more budget, etc). Be on the lookout for things that could become problems that aren’t yet. If they aren’t purely technical (such as a messy PT board, bad UX, poor communication to client, etc), provide guidance to team members to help them improve and inform Head of Project Success so that steps can be taken to improve these other areas. Help put out fires when they occur. Ideally, we help prevent fires from occurring, but shit happens and when it does we own it and try to fix it quickly. Daily standups and check-ins with the Head of Project Success to report on status of projects, discuss concerns and brainstorm ways to make the projects and the processes we use across projects better. The Tech Director role is an evolving one, so the above are suggestions that have been working so far, but are not set in stone. A Tech Director should also feel excited and empowered to improve the process of being a Tech Director. At its core, AE is a consulting company promising sound, product-focused technical solutions and so the role of Tech Director is one of the most important roles at the company.

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