1:1s have been the most important thing for me as a lead. Gives you a chance to know your team, what they’re good at, what they struggle with. Let’s you head off a bad direction early. When your directs have a non urgent question they’ll probably save it for your next meeting rather than pinging you constantly with everything that jumps into their mind.
30 minutes with a teammate getting them unstuck is more impactful than 30 minutes of coding on some random feature
I like them a lot. Sometimes I use it as an agenda to sell an idea in a meeting. Othertimes I backport them after a decision has been made. It’s the context that drives a decision that easily gets lost to time.
I’ve been burned when a technical decision hurt us down the road and no one could really remember why we made it to begin with.