What is expected from a Tech Lead?

lead team and product

After you reach the Senior level, one of the paths that you can follow is to become a Tech Lead and lead a team and product.

Aside from contributing as an IC (individual contributor), you must also lead a team and a product.

This article will describe what is expected from you.

Lead a Team

Providing clear direction and setting expectations for the team, a Tech Lead serves as a leader who inspires and motivates.

Offering guidance and mentorship to team members, fostering their professional growth and skill development.

Allocating your team in the most important tasks.

Doing 1:1 and getting team feedback.

Making your team more productive.

Pair programming and knowledge sharing with your team. Additionally, help them break big issues into small issues and unblock them.

Providing training and knowledge-sharing sessions.

Lead a Product

Prioritize work into a product to achieve some outcomes.

Review issues, product design, and system design.

Manage the scope of the delivery.

Deeply understand the product, the problem space, the customer needs, and the business strategy.

Monitor product usage in production, and be able to propose improvements and control the roadmap.

Quality Assurance

Conducting regular code reviews to maintain high-quality standards and adherence to best practices.

Increase quality by adding automated tests and improving the test process with a test plan.

For every “bad” code in a pull request, explain why that code is not a good one, and provide a better solution.

For every incident or bug in production, write a post-mortem to understand why the bug or incident happened in production, and how can you improve the process and the codebase to avoid this from happening again in the future.

Resume and Updates

As your company grows, and you add more squads, C-levels will act much more on resumes and updates from the managers.

Writing resumes of meetings and updates for the team and product, lets anybody from the company catch up on what is going on.

It also helps us understand our decisions and reevaluate if there were good ones as time passes.

Ownership and Operation

Tech leads should be owners of their squad/team and product.

They are responsible for everything that goes wrong. If someone from your squad messed up and shipped a bug to production, you are responsible for this.

Operating software is using production tooling to understand how the user is using your product, how the software is working in production, and understand unexpected behavior of the system in production. Running migrations or on-off scripts to fix some bugs or data inconsistencies.

Briefly

As you progress in your career you will be given more responsibilities.

You will have more upsides (a bigger salary, a bigger bonus, and more equity), but it will also have more downsides.

Think about the new responsibilities as new opportunities for learning and growing in your career.

You don't want to be a CRUD-only developer forever.