Team Lead Track

Team Lead Track

Progression of titles is not based on time, but rather skill and experience. A title represents where you are in your journey. To provide focus in skill development you should understand the expectations of someone performing at a particular title. Title progression is compounding; once you move to the next title, the expectations for all preceding titles come along.

Engineers and leaders that know their domain AND the fintech sector wield a veritable super power. Having both the context of our customer and the skill to create, will position you to do great things.

Ethos of an Engineering Leader

• comes from the ranks of engineering and has built technical competency in the domain they’re leading.
• posses and builds empathy for the experience of engineers and the complexities of engineering.
• load bearing leadership that operates with humility & service.
• promotes a culture of hygiene over a bunch of rules.
• defaults to transparency in communication, planning, decision making, and growth.
• fair over long frames of time.
• bias to action that is motivated by right intent.

Software Engineer, Supervisor

Narrow in scope, transitional in nature

As a Software Engineer Supervisor, your role should be seen as an introduction to leadership. A supervisor contributes code, but has formal management responsibilities for a small or experienced team. This is a great role to try out for a bit and then swing back into an individual contributor.

• Coordinate and communicate your team’s work by maintaining a roadmap to ensure all work is adequately represented with scope, people, resources, and timelines.
• Engage with other team leads to coordinate multi-team initiatives.
• Ensure your team is adequately managing support and customer issues by working directly with operations groups to clarify thorny or nebulous issues.
• Ensure team ceremonies are agreed upon, documented, and happen on a regular cadence.
• Build and maintain rapport with individual team members through regular 1:1s.
• Continue to code and participate in your team’s support processes, but with a focus on issues that are not time-critical or would otherwise block your team if progress is slow.
• Participate in the development and maintenance of your team’s standards, practices, principles, and values.
• Recognized as a leader and mentor within the team.

Engineering Manager

Full scope of responsibility for a team, or a small number of teams

As a team lead, your scope of responsibility will include one or more teams of engineers. This role is great to go deeper into what it takes to build and maintain a high functioning team. While your role may focus more on the function or health of a team you will be expected to keep up your technical competency. Your primary responsibilities are to build, grow, and maintain high-performance teams, and to guide the personal and professional growth of individuals on the team. If you are a first time team lead it is not unusual to spend a few years in this role and later decide to move back to an individual contributor. This is not a lock in.

• Develop and understand your team’s capacity and velocity. Guard their focus!
• Translate business drivers to your team to make sure they have enough context to deliver.
• Communicate blockers and delays outward.
• Engage with the engineers, leadership, product and operations teams to coordinate and ensure project progress.
• Effectively use your 1:1s to maintain team health and guide the personal and professional growth of individuals to help them navigate their roles and careers.
• Guide your team by building a shared vision of goals and where opinions differ, faciltate decisions to disagree and commit.
• Remain vigilant to your team’s need for new processes, and close gaps in standards, practices, principles, and values on the team.
• Proactively and effectively communicate your team’s staffing needs.
• Coordinate the recruitment, retention, and hiring of new team members when growing your team.
• Identify and provide opportunity to future leaders through guidance and delegation.

Senior Engineering Manager

Leader of leaders, Deeply Complex/Critical domain, multiple cross-functional domains, or multi-team projects

As a senior leader, you may focus on a single critical/complex domain or lead multiple teams with team leads. Your role is both tactical and strategic. It will include implementing and contributing to programs and initiatives of a director, senior technical staff and strategic owners.

• Responsible for a single critical/complex domain or multiple domains or multi-team initiatives.
• Remove blockers for the teams you serve.
• Sponsor and coordinate third-party integrations across disciplines and teams.
• Communicate initiative status to strategic owners.
• Maintain working relationships with other Jack Henry groups, third parties, vendors, and other groups outside the Jack Henry Digital business unit.
• Coach and guide the leads in your group, through 1:1s and by identifying opportunities for growth.
• Provide guidance to your teams to help determine priority of engineering, business, and internal team initiatives.
• Align engineering teams to efficiently implement organizational priorities, and help your teams and individuals understand how their tasks relate to those priorities.
• Ensure the development, maintenance, and implementation of processes, standards, practices, principles, and values at an organizational level.
• Alongside staff+ engineers advocate for and promote cultural objectives.
• Have an intimate understanding of team capacity and velocity in your group, and effectively communicate staffing needs.
• Clear and concise with communication and able to remain on point.

Director

Overseer for an aspect of the organization

As a director, your scope of responsibility expands from overseeing multiple teams to managing a larger group. You are a leader who has had a long and respected career in the field and domain you serve. Whether you choose to stay more technical, become product‑focused, or focus on organizational health depends on the needs of your teams and the kind of director you aim to be.

Your focus is strategic, load‑bearing, and diplomatic (not political or power‑consolidating). You enable strategic initiatives by providing context, alignment, and support to the teams in your care.

Team Culture

• Directors, Sr Directors, Managing Directors, Sr Managing Directors, and the CTO all work for the Engineering teams. The director’s mindset is enabling teams to work on the right thing at the right time.
• The director should focus on and emphasize developer experience.
• This includes FTE, onshore contractors, and offshore contractors.
• High‑quality engineers are most successful in a frictionless environment.
• Focus should be on making it easier for engineers to produce and deploy for Jack Henry.
• Communication should be open and transparent.
  • Directors should promote communication in open Slack channels.
  • Direct messages have a purpose but should be used only when appropriate.
• The director should emphasize ownership for each team member.
  • Members should understand the problem and the strategy to solve it (and help shape the solution).
  • Leadership should ensure information and perspective are shared so ICs can develop broader understanding and vision.
• Do the Right Thing: Directors should build intuition for good decision‑making and demonstrate humility when falling short — this applies to both positive and negative decisions.
• Always Learning: Directors must remain relevant and respected in their domain. This requires continuous learning.

Compliance and Audit

• Ensure all compliance and audit items are well covered and documented.
• Related to findings:
  • Verify delivery teams and team leads follow OCTO compliance guidance outlined in the Kenna SLA Compliance document.
  • Findings should be owned by the director. They do not always need to be accepted, but must be taken seriously and handled correctly.
• Leadership should compare GH Security performance with Kenna findings to confirm no reporting/performance gaps exist.
• Teams should work SLAs in Kenna within 30–60 days due while maintaining a good engineer experience.

Financial Targets

• Revenue and Expense Forecasting:
  • Completed monthly and delivered by the communicated due date.
  • Ensures revenue, expense, and capex are accurately forecasted for remaining fiscal months.
  • Budget objectives should be considered and met for the fiscal year.
• Staffing:
  • Before approving requisitions, always verify with finance that it is included in the financial plan and forecasted for the correct month.
  • Provide justification to your leader before approval.

How We Work

The CTO Engineering team follows a structured, organized approach. Directors must adopt and support this approach.

Roadblocks: Identification and Escalation

• Encourage use of common communication channels for blockers:
  • Direct communication with a manager
  • Callouts in project status update meetings
  • Posting in #blockers Slack channel
• Directors should use weekly status updates to escalate unresolved blockers to senior leadership.

Deployment

• Trunk‑based commits should be required and encouraged.
• Rollbacks should be easy; this requires small, specific deployments.

Pre‑PI Priority Review (with Product Lead)

• Teams should be clearly organized heading into PI planning.
• Teams should leave with a prioritized backlog for the new increment.
• Directors should drive prioritization based on:
  • Strategic meetings (e.g., design onsites)
  • Strategic priorities
  • Revenue initiatives
  • Platform health initiatives
• Execution should follow the How We Work framework (Engineering + Product + Design).

Additional Responsibilities

• Understand project communication types: Private, Advisory, Public
• Understand rollout methods: Closed BETA, Open BETA, GA
• Support Quarterly Product & Design Onsite engagements.
• Review the Look What We Did channel monthly.
• Support Team Health Days.
• Contribute to (not lead):
  • Roadmap rankings
  • 6‑month roadmaps
  • Guidance roadmaps
  • Strategic Operating Priorities
  • Design alignment decks
• Team capacity planning
  • Directors must stay ahead of demand by maintaining strategy and priority awareness.
  • Use the Barrels for Revenue worksheet to communicate capacity planning for must‑hit opportunities.

Administrative Responsibilities

• Weekly Status must include:
  • Director‑led strategic project listing with delivery expectations.
• Succession Planning:
  • Due Jan 15 each year; reviewed with HR BP and then with your leader.
• Communication
  • Org and domain leadership should be clear to everyone.
  • Domain ownership must be maintained and updated as changes occur.
  • Team dynamic changes should be announced in org-engineering.
• Documentation
  • APIs must be documented and published on jackhenry.dev (primary site for API documentation).

Measuring

• Review operational KPIs weekly and adjust performance across support/install/configuration teams.
• Mature teams should operate under firefighter process/standards; all others should be progressing toward it.

KPIs

• KPIs will be strengthened collaboratively.
• KPIs must be shown in weekly reports.
• SLIs/SLOs should be the foundation for system health measurement.
• KPIs should be documented and published.

Additional Metrics

• Pace of Delivery:
  • Measure delivery velocity; communicate measurement methods and results to the org.
• Testing:
  • Threshold testing should occur in build pipelines and be measurable and accounted for.
• Incident Readiness:
  • Each domain needs incident checklists ready.
• Capacity Planning:
  • For services, compute, data, etc., planning must be done monthly at minimum.
  • Engineering managers complete the capacity planning worksheet.

The Engineering Team

• Responsible for building, deploying, and maintaining service health for their domains.
• Owns the work to streamline production deployment.
• Must consider deployment dependencies:
  • Communications
  • Security
  • Cloud Infrastructure
• Must consider domain service dependencies.