Remove project lead role
Created by: nicksnyder
The project lead role was created in https://github.com/sourcegraph/about/pull/774. That PR description is missing context on why it was created so I will add that context here for two reasons:
- The context helps explain why we are now removing this role.
- I discovered last week that at least one teammate made incorrect assumptions about why we had created this role in the first place, so I want to make it clear for everyone else too.
The project lead role was created out of necessity because we had more projects than engineering managers, and the product team needed an engineering point of contact for each project. @mrnugget had been effectively doing this role already for campaigns so we wanted to give it a name and define it so we could communicate expectations to other engineers on the team for their respective projects, and so it was clear to our product team who their point of contact was. We did NOT create this role because creating a label for this set of responsibilities bestowed special power on any single engineer that allowed them to do this job better (as I said before, @mrnugget was already doing this job effectively without having the role defined).
What has changed? Why are we removing this role?
We decided that we wanted to end up with an engineering manger per team, and we now have that outcome. These managers are responsible for the management portion of the removed project lead role, and the remaining responsibilities are those of every engineer on the team, therefore the project lead role is no longer necessary.
Similar to its creation, the removal of this role neither creates nor destroys agency or responsibility for each engineer to contribute to the success of their team. Nobody at Sourcegraph should feel constrained by their documented responsibilities.
The removal of this role does not preclude us from creating new roles that may become relevant in the future (such roles can be proposed by anyone by making a PR to the handbook).