What Being a Team-Lead Means To Me (My Hng Pre-Internship and Internship Experience)

I know this is not a C# coding secret or anything, this article is about my journey in tech, please enjoy.

I applied for the Hotels.ng Pre-internship or otherwise known as Start.ng program during the month of August 2019 which lasted for 3 weeks and also the Hotels.ng internship 6.0 during the month of September — November 2019 and I must say it was a rewarding experience as I got the chance to taste and see what it means to work alongside people from different countries, states , tribes,and works of life as interns. I was lucky to take up the role of being a team-lead on three(3) different teams who worked on different projects successfully and i want to share what i learnt ,please enjoy.

So quick note, i was kind of like a newbie when it comes to leading a group of people to work on and deliver a project or achieve a particular goal so it was kind of like a challenge for me at the beginning, it was even tougher considering the fact that the people I was working with on these projects were all working remotely, you know how difficult it is to lead people even offline, now imagine how exhausting it will be to lead different people from different countries to come deliver a project successfully without chaos, troubles, arguments and misunderstanding. So believe me it was very challenging, although I was not the only team lead responsible for leading the teams (Team Stockholm, Team Omnitrix and Team Deimos) to deliver the projects then , I was working alongside 8 other great interns as my fellow team leads because we were all leading over 300 fellow interns from different countries who had different backgrounds and values, in addition i have also not seen or met any of them prior to the internship (remote-life, woo-hoo!!!) but it was really fun working with them.

I took up the mantle not really knowing how difficult but rewarding it would be but I learnt and acquired some skills, for instance I learnt soft skills, people management, project management skills, communication skills and most importantly empathy.

Now i found out that a team lead is responsible for guiding a group of developers and designers to complete and deliver a project, now the mindset I always had about being a team-leader is that the project and its deadline must come first, NOTHING ELSE MATTERS, deliver the project at all cost , no matter what it takes. Well I was very wrong I must say, it was more than that, although the project is important, but putting your team members into consideration also matters, communicating with them properly and not rudely will help to keep them happy and ease any pressure that comes with delivering on any project, so I figured out that having soft skills is very very important, how I communicate with people is important, it takes a great deal of patience to deal with people from different backgrounds, because their mode of communicating their thoughts will definitely differ from mine.

We used Slack to communicate during the entirety of the internship and well others who took it up a notch had to get my personal contact. I had cases where I would be getting messages and calls at 2am, 4am from fellow interns concerning issues with the projects, how to resolve a bug, how to go about completing a particular task, how to use git and github effectively, I also had some people come into my dm to vent about how frustrating the projects and its timelines are, about how they are tired of certain unforeseen occurrences and just want to drop out of the internship due to the pressure , so I would have to calm them down and give them a reason or two not to give up, give them tips on how to resolve their bugs, how to work with git and github effectively and so on.

Another headache was assigning tasks, wow, this was just wow, in fact it was the master of all wows, the architect of my frustration as a team-lead, delegating tasks and to well over 300 fellow team members and making sure that everyone was satisfied, it was frustrating, it was tiring I must say, but that is where the fun is, right?

I and my fellow interns had to join heads together because you know the saying “Multiple heads are better than one”, we did not have access to project management tools like Air-table, Pivotal tracker or any tools as a matter of fact so yes it was frustrating, and even when we had, it was still frustrating too because sometimes not every team member/intern would have a task so we would have to go back to the drawing board to think of how the issue can be resolved.

I must confess that at first it was frustrating for me because I didn’t have time for myself, I didn’t have time to take care of my issues because I was really occupied with handling other peoples issues but that was what I signed up for right? I learnt to be a team player, I learnt to be patient, approachable, understanding people, showing empathy, I also learnt to put others before me, I also learnt how to think on my feet, because I remember we had multiple times where project deadlines will be cut short and we would have to improvise and take different approaches to make sure that we deliver the said projects successfully and that everyone is happy at the end of the day.

All in all, would I love to become a Tech lead, a project manager, a product manager sometime in the future? Yes, yes, yes, and yes I would love to take up the role.

The HNG internship 6.0 was an eye opener for me really, it was difficult, it was rewarding, it was fun, it was frustrating, but above all, I made awesome friends, and i gained experience.

Thanks for reading.