Or: How to lead if you're not a manager. In the time of empowered (and hopefully self-organizing) teams it feels like a given, that not only people in management positions should be the ones taking on leadership. Heck, some teams and organizations even require their teams and senior developers to 'be leaders' without any kind of formal authority. At the same time, it feels very difficult to nail down what leading means for people who are not enabled by an organization's authority as managers usually are.

Over the course of those last two years, I found a structure for having 1on1 meetings that helps me a lot to get the most of these meetings, and which also helped to make 1on1s a deeply ingrained part of vaamo's tech team culture.

Since I started working at my current role two years ago, I started to give the purpose and structure of the 1on1 meetings I had with my team members more thought.
And I want to share what I think is the purpose of having 1on1s.

Some time ago, as I started to spend more time on growing our tech team at vaamo again, I realized that I had put off one thing for much too long already: Putting down my definition of maturity and technical leadership in software teams. In order to get this finally sorted out, I'll lay out the aspects that together make up a mature developer.