I know it's common to wear a lot of hats while at a startup, but I'm trying to understand my role is so that:
a) if / when the company grows, I know what position i should navigate toward?
b) if the company doesn't work out, what are the positions I should be seeking on the market?
I'll try and make this brief:
- I started my career as a backend programmer.
- Three years ago, I became employee #1 at a company my friend / colleague started (mobile app), doing backend programming
- We hired more and i became the Backend lead
- We hired more and I started doing Devops as well
- We hired more and I became the "Software Team Lead" doing Software Management work and Project Management work as well.
So today, the company is about 20 people, 10 of whom are engineers. We also have UX/Product Management and Design personnel. I spend my time in the following ways:
- Meeting with UX/Product Management and stakeholders to discuss product goals and technical feasibility, as well as pairing down scope as needed
- Making stories from those goals and organizing the backlog and planning sprints
- Providing general guidance to the software team as a whole, as far as how we're going to approach things, facilitating coordination between team members, and generally being the liaison between them and the business.
- Providing timelines and estimates to stakeholders, and balancing long-term feature work, with short term business needs and technical debt that needs addressing.
- On the backend, doing code reviews and implementation guidance
- QA work and Acceptance Testing to make sure that completed stories are truly releasable.
- Some Devops work as far as automating workflows for the developers, release pipelines, CI / CD, etc.
- Big picture work as far as planning what features we'll be doing three months from now, and what bottlenecks will need to be addressed based on projected business growth
Question: What is my role? Or what ARE my roles? If i were on the job market tomorrow, what sorts of positions would I be applying for?