As a team lead, my job is to make all the mistakes on my team. I’m responsible for each one of them. I’m also responsible for deciding what we do about them, whether that’s to ensure that they can’t happen again or ignore them because they’re easy to recover from.
That time someone on my team built a feature that didn’t ship because of a bug? I could have made sure the requirements were clearer, or they had more access to the product owner, or a more useful design review, or a more useful code review, or a better test plan. Or all of those, or none of those, or something else. I could have – should have – got the problems out of their way.
They don’t make mistakes, I do.
