LCICOB model

Self assessment table

	Leadership	Coding	Initiative	Communication	Ownership	Business
LVL1	Onboarding	API	Curiosity for new initiatives	Within a team	For your artifacts	Prioritization
LVL2	Mentoring	Automation	Taking initiatives	Write good documentation	For team artifacts	Calculating cost
LVL3	Team Lead	Reading Code	Proposing initiatives	In front of the audience	For department artifacts	Cost of refactoring and automation
LVL4	Cross-functional TL	Writing App Code	Owning long term initiatives	About failures	For product or project artifacts	Tooling vs labor
LVL5	Indirect Lead	Implementing Dev practices	Company-wide initiatives	Inspire other	For organization	Profitability vs Growth

Leadership

Level 1: Onboarding

• Caring for other
• Making newcomers feel welcome
• Taking on extra responsibilities to improve how others feel
• Providing your personal attention to others
• Making sure other are successful in their roles

Level 2: Mentoring

• Long term commitment to others growth
• Assess and adjust to other individual situation and style
• Reacts to the needs of mentees
• Fosters good practices

Level 3: Team Lead

• Taking responsibility for others
• Develop skills of others
• Responsibility for fair pay
• Responsibility for promotions
• Responsibility for wellbeing
• Responsibility for team’s delivery
• Responsibility for team’s behaviour and soft skills
• Hiring
• Solving team member’s problems

Level 4: Cross-functional Team Lead

• Guide specialists from other competencies
• Get to know the scope of other specialist
• Develop common growth practices
• Find other ways to help grow their technical competencies
• Develop your skills required to specialists from other areas

Level 5: Indirect Lead

• Guide specialists with a help of Team Leads
• Build a strong team of TL
• Create practices and goals common and applicable to the whole practice
• Have a long term direction and onboard your team to travel with you to the same goal

Coding

Level 1: Be proficient in API

• Know where is web browsers, mobile apps and server-side boundaries
• Know how backend and frontend is communicating
• Able to read and understand API calls, headers and payloads
• Intercept and modify request

Level 2: Test Automation

• Ability to write automated tests
• Able to maintain automated tests
• Know what can be automated
• Understand cost of test automation implementation and maintenance
• API and UI E2E

Level 3: Reading Developers Code

• White box testing includes knowing what changes are done and how their were implemented
• Suggesting how to make application more testable
• Explore other types of test automation
• Understand what code coverage is and it’s limitations
• Help developers write better automated tests

Level 4: Writing application code

• To have a decent understanding about coding you need to have hands on experience
• Problem solving mindset
• Ability to write application without a help from guide
• You can not lead developers if you don’t know how to code¹

Level 5: Implementing practices

• Be able to lead new development initiatives
• Are able to assess competence of other developers and help them be more effective
• Knowing enough to be able to pinpoint problems and prioritize them
• Able to spot shortcomings and how to overcome them
• Having enough knowledge to provide arguments for decisions

Initiative

Level 1: Be curious for new initiatives and research them

• Why are we doing them
• How it will affect you and your team
• What are the steps to do them
• How it was researched and who came up with it
• What are the requirements to own and drive initiatives
• How good initiatives looks like and why their were successful

Level 2: Take initiative and deliver it

• Learn how to get things done
• Create a network of acquaintances while delivering initiatives
• Coordinate with other
• Make extensive research on the subjects
• Learn where to find useful information
• Focus on the main points and mind the deadline
• Learn how to tracking progress

Level 3: Mentoring

• Research current problems
• Find and propose solutions
• Assemble working group which can deliver and complete the initiative
• Maintain observability on the progress and timelines
• Addressing risks
• Helping other with delivery their parts
• Reporting progress to stakeholders

Level 4: Drive a long term goal

• Split large scope goals into multiple initiatives
• Long term coordination
• Fail fast mindset
• Adjust a plan according to the progress and feedback
• Communicate with multiple teams
• Track progress over the multiple tracks
• Creating reporting lines and guidelines

Level 5: Company wide initiatives

• Communicate with every involved department
• Work on procedures and documentation
• Create rollout plan
• Company wide communication
• Budget forecasts and reporting
• Example: Creating new department

Communication

Level 1: Communicate within a team

• If you have an opinion you should be able to share it with your team
• Help foster open communication
• Share feedback with each other
• Be willing to help your teammates
• Have a good relationship with teammates

Level 2: Ability to write good documentation

• Able to write clear and readable documentation
• Using data and visualization as an aid to explain complex topics
• Can find a best way and form to transfer your idea
• Can customise text to better suit your target audience
• Can spot ambiguous text and change it to avoid misinterpretation

Level 3: Ability to speak in front of audience

• Able to speak in front of a big audience on the topic you are the expert in
• Able to share your knowledge with others, so other would be able to learn from your experience
• Able to present during department, guild or product demo
• Key takeaway is that if you have something to share you are able to do that with a big audience you are not familiar with

Level 4: Able to speak in front of a audience about failures

• Able to announce layoffs in front of the live audience
• Able to build a connection with a big audience and try to monitor your performance through their reactions
• Being polite and mindful of the audience
• Stress is a hard thing to control and for some it can take a lot of practice

Level 5: Inspire other

• Able to find a believable purpose and inspire others when needed
• Can avoid lies and promises he knows he can’t keep while doing so
• Is aware of the audience fears and anxieties and address them
• Can spot common goal and create a believable path to get there
• Can be confident in the plan even if it have a small chance, but it is a best one there is

Ownership

Level 1: For Your Artifacts

• You care what other might think about your artifacts
• You seeking perfection
• You searching for the ways how to improve your skills and deliverables
• Quality and completeness is important to you
• Taking in feedback as valuable lessons you can learn from

Level 2: For Team Artifacts

• You want your team to succeed
• You help team members who needs help
• You can prioritize helping other instead of trying to boost your personal performance
• You care about team culture and motivation
• Organize or participate in informal team activities
• Giving positive encouragement and kudos to your team members

Level 3: For Department Artifacts

• You celebrate achievements of the department
• You care how well it is performing
• You want for colleagues in your department to be happy and enjoy working
• You often think how you can help improve or contribute to the department goals and share or implement them
• You would go extra mile if you knew it will benefit your department

Level 4: For Project/Product Artifacts

• You want product or project you are working on to succeed
• You share your opinion and ideas on how to make it better
• Are you inspiring other to do the same
• You are proud of the product or project you are working on and sometime share success stories with other people outside the company
• You would recommend the product to other

Level 5: For Organization

• Your values match organization values
• You care for organizations mission and vision
• You want your friends to work with you
• You interact with a posts your organization publishes
• You searching for new ways you can help it grow
• You are proud to wear swag of that organization

Business

Level 1: Prioritization

• You can tell which feature is more important
• You can prioritize your work to gain most value
• You can tell which bugs must be fixed and which are not blocking the release

Level 2/3/4: Calculation of cost when deciding

• Can calculate the cost of fixing a bug versus it’s impact and severity to the users using
• Can calculating the cost of implementing tool/framework/approach and how much value product or client will gain from it
• Can calculate the cost of automating manual work
• Include documentation and reports cost into calculation
• Can use data to drive decision making

Level 2/3/4: Cost of Refactoring or Automation

• Know business point of view of refactoring and automation and using it to create well prepared proposal
• Creating a roadmap of test automation or refactoring with a break even point or calculated ROI term
• You can track automation progress and set a threshold when it becomes too expensive to maintain
• Calculating maintenance, infrastructure and execution costs for automation
• Bundling refactor with other initiatives to boost ROI
• Perfect vs Pareto principle

Level 2/3/4: Tooling vs. Manual work

• Can calculate implementation cost of paid tool vs hired manual labor for specific tasks
• Able to identify and calculate the impact of risks
• Real cost of test automation (hiring automation specialists, salary (brutto), infrastructure, execution costs, test data, required integration, CI/CD, etc.)

Level 5: Profitability vs Growth

• Should stakeholders invest more or organize to become more profitable
• What is the expected ROI on each invested euro
• Can we grow in current economic and geopolitical situation
• Product-market fit, market saturation, PCM, CAC, EBITDA

Footnote

Footnotes

1. Not a strict rule, true in most of the cases. ↩