Who Are Tech Leads
The reports must highlight the development metrics, the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), success metrics, and future trends. They are also responsible for promoting a culture of innovation and instilling leadership skills in younger minds. While developing code, many challenges come and go — a dynamic world where each day brings new quirks. Tech leads are responsible for setting a project’s scope, team, and resources. They also definite the best practices and establish the frameworks to improve the team’s performance.
By doing so, they empower developers to write clean and maintainable code, reducing technological debt and enhancing the efficiency of the development process. A software engineer might transition into being a tech lead and later decide to take off the tech lead hat. This shift isn’t a demotion or a loss of seniority; instead, the engineer is choosing to focus on a different set of skills and responsibilities. If they’d like to focus instead more on coding, they may choose to stop being a tech lead, at least temporarily.
Taking charge of your career growth
Firstly, stepping into the tech lead role brings with it an explosion of responsibilities that a software engineer has never experienced beforehand. In addition, many of these new responsibilities are non-technical and thus often very hard to grasp for someone with an engineering background. Ultimately, the choice between the two roles depends on personal technical lead developer strengths, interests, and career aspirations. The question isn’t about the tech lead vs engineering manager role for you, the question is “do you want to switch from doing tech to managing tech? If the answer is yes, start building soft skills alongside tech skills. An engineering manager is not an active contributor to the code repository.
- They met with other Tech Leads to ensure our system fit in with the broader company ecosystem.
- They provide technical leadership, guidance, and support, and play a crucial role in ensuring the success of projects.
- They also help team members to develop their soft skills, like leadership or conflict management.
- They monitor the progress of the project so they can identify potential bottlenecks.
- Valuable insights into these activities enable you to move from a feeling-driven to a data-driven leadership approach and analyze metrics that matter.
They need to make architectural decisions and understand the codebase well – hence, they need to be technically sound and capable overall. With a clear plan and structure, technical leads can allocate time to the tasks where their expertise makes a difference. Tech leads in most organizations are considered a role assigned to a developer, rather than a job title in and of itself. Like a senior developer, a tech lead is an individual contributor rather than a manager with direct reports. That being said, every organization is different, and you may find a tech lead with some formal managerial duties.
Three things that are limiting your impact as an engineer
They play a collaborative role with the DevOps and the Project Managers, maintaining a vital link in the technical project’s chain – ensuring everything is in the direction of the predefined goals. Not everyone in the tech lead role will take on all of these duties. Some of the scheduling tasks in particular may be seen as more the job of a true manager. And also, keep in mind the distinction between a jack-of-all-trades tech lead and one with a specialty in a specific topic.
Since tech leads are considered to be both technical experts and competent supervisors, you’ll need a decent amount of experience first. In the above example, a team may have a Product Manager, an Engineering Manager and a Tech Lead. Leadership is shared between the three roles but each provides a different focus. In this situation, the Tech Lead focuses more on technical topics.
In this article, we will clearly define what a tech lead does nowadays, what the position’s responsibilities are, and what they can do to improve their strategies and bring added value to the bottom line. Taking our suggestions into account will show you how to become a better technical lead. You can also check out our list of the 10 best engineering management books for more insight into this subject.
And as a Tech Lead one of your goals is to help your team get better at their jobs, not do their jobs for them. Developing all those skills can make you the tech lead that any team would wish for. Bringing pets to work shouldn’t be something that a tech lead thinks about, but the feedback about developers’ needs, goals, work progress, or general happiness should be. As we mentioned, a successful tech lead knows how to make the best of any situation.
Of course, every start-up is different, with different products, goals, and set-ups. But if you have a technical product, regardless of how big or small your company is, there are strong arguments for having an ongoing technical role in your start-up team. Yes, it is possible for someone to be a good Tech Lead but not necessarily excel as an Engineering Manager.
The Tech lead role includes responsibilities such as business development, planning, designing, leading, and implementing technical solutions and improvements. That’s why our platform enables both to accelerate velocity and align with business priorities specific to each role while encouraging a collaborative work environment. With more than 1,000 new packages being added to NPM repositories daily, keeping up to date with all tech newbies is impossible. Therefore, one of the most critical tech lead responsibilities is filtering new technologies and focusing solely on valuable tools and promising libraries. It is crucial to have a clear goal for the team and the technology they want to work with.
