TL: Not Just Another Fancy Title
So You Want to Be a Tech Lead? Here's What You Need to Know
If you are new to Leadership Letters, this is a periodic publication where I share insights into leadership qualities and challenges that are commonly encountered but not frequently discussed. Drawing from my experiences in the industry, working with leaders at prominent companies such as Apple, Google (#faang), and beyond, I aim to explore effective engineering leadership styles. My goal is to infuse a sense of enjoyment into technology, as it rightfully should be for all.
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Today we are going to take a look at one of the most oversimplified tech titles we see across the industry, Tech Lead. Diving into the role and scope, we will also explore what are some of the key things a TL needs to keep top of their mind. We will close this out with some gotchas around becoming a TL for your team(s).
Tech Leads
In engineering teams TLs are generally the senior and highly technical folks who act as a bridge between individual contributors and management. They wear many hats, combining coding skills with leadership qualities to guide the team's technical direction and overall success. It is generally the entrance to the world of engineering leadership. That’s not just it, across many companies there are tiers of Tech Leads, let’s quickly explore the most common ones.
Hierarchy is generally defined as Tech Leads (TL) leading individual contributors (ICs) within a team to achieve a team goal (typically they are L5s), Uber Tech Lead (UTL) leading a group of TLs within a group of closely connected teams (typically they are L6s) and Area Tech Lead (ATL) helping senior leadership set the right strategy in high performing technical engineering organizations (typically they are L7s). One thing that is common across all of these folks is that they are all not yet ready to give up IC work and take on a full time management role. Let’s visualize this hierarchy. (I used levels.fyi job levels for reference here.)
Tech Lead = Technical Expertise + Leadership
In this post we will cover the role a TL plays in the success of a team. If you are the TL of a team, it is within your job expectations that you will be managing deliverables from the whole unit. That often means running your own meetings to assess interests, work with individuals to find owners for pieces of a project and keep track of progress regularly. But is that all? Of course not, remember a TL is still an IC, that means you need to take on some of the pieces of the project yourself. This is where things get a little fuzzy. As a TL a natural instinct might be to take on the hardest problem yourself as you might be the strongest technical person on the team but in real life that does not work too well. Remember your role is right at the intersection of Technology and Leadership. As a TL, one of your primary goals is to constantly stretch members of your team to expand their expertise, align projects according to skills and interests, providing everyone opportunities to grow.
Let’s now walk through the life of a typical TL. If your team is taking up a new multi-year long project, it is very important to walk through the problem and to make logical divisions into smaller components. Depending upon your team structure, these components can range from work that can be done in a quarter to multiple year long efforts. This is a good time to loop in your team and go through this vision and divisions once more. It might sound a little repetitive, but I have found it very helpful for particularly two reasons:
It provides you an opportunity to catch obvious errors/overlooking pretty early into planning
Open discussions encourage ICs on your team to feel involved and share the vision
Next step is to find owners for these components. As a TL you might be very familiar with expertise on your team, have clear ideas around who would be a right fit for particular pieces but it is crucial to have discussions with individuals to ensure your mapping reflects the reality today. Even though you might feel as the best fit for some of the components, keep an open mind on letting someone else pick up that work if they are interested. This gives rise to the biggest dilemma, does it mean TLs are often doing the grunge work, the work that nobody wants to do? While that is not entirely true, as a TL you might feel unsure about how to demonstrate your impact in the next performance evaluation. Let’s visualize a project using a circular structure.
As a Tech Lead whenever I felt like I was losing the opportunity to work on the most exciting problem, a change in perspective really helped me. I personally struggled with feeling productive when I first took on a TL role, but that deserves a post of its own. The above image portrays the project as a whole, the leftover pieces belong to you as a TL. While those pieces alone don’t mean anything, if you take them out, the entire project falls apart. You might still be actively contributing to other parts of the projects continuously via design and code reviews, but claiming them as your impact might feel unethical, and rightfully so. Last thing you want to do as a TL is to alienate your team members by claiming victory on their work. Focus on the work that you delivered and how it ties all the different pieces of the project back to solving the bigger problem.
Today we discussed the hard part and struggles of being a Tech Lead. If you’re a TL today, I’d urge you to prioritize your team’s growth over yourself. You are at the very first step of becoming a leader and your success is no longer being measured by the things you deliver, but by growing others. Focus on the bigger picture!
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