The Technical Lead’s Path: A Retrospective To My First 5 Years Leading People
TL;DR
The Tech Lead path is not an easy one. Do not expect everything to run smoothly for no reason, or the Universe and stars to be aligned just for you and your team 100% of the time. The reality can be more daunting and perhaps a hard to swallow pill; but on the other hand, you can expect many good things out of this: recognition, experience, the sense of fulfillment for your team’s success and more importantly, a constant self-training state in which you’ll develop a lot of soft skills and communication techniques that throughout time will just get better.
During my first 5 years of experience as a Technical Lead I’ve had the chance to work in a variety of products, business areas (financial, IoT, services, enterprise apps, etc.), environments, people, managers, executive boards, investors, etc. With this article I’ll aim to transfer every experience I had in a 5-minutes read so that, if possible, you can learn from my mistakes and successes and perhaps leave a comment or two down below.
The Technical Lead Path I’m gonna talk to you about in this article will make no aim to fulfill your expectations in regards to give you an all-positive message about tech-leading people nor will I try to comply to what you are expecting to read; this will be comprised of the bare and cold truth from my personal standpoint and years of experience. I will divide this into two sections, one to explain the good things you can expect as a Tech Lead; and the second one as a list of bad things you can also expect, right under each bullet point I’ll add an advise that can (perhaps) be of use for you in your career.
The Good Parts of Working as a Tech Lead
Recognition
Recognition can be classified as internal and external. As a Tech Lead you tend to be the bridge that connects business and engineering, such a bridge has to be robust and tolerate certain loads (ones larger than others). Therefore such recognition can come from two sides, from your internal team or from the external side of things (stakeholders, management, business, product team, etc.)
It’s always a good advise to direct such recognition to the person (or persons) in your team who really deserve it and make it transparent. As a rule of thumb: share the good apples from the harvesting, and keep the bad ones for you (or at least most of them).
Experience (lots of it)
As a Tech Lead you’ll have many opportunities for growth and gaining experience.
Don’t waste them, take advantage of every opportunity whether it has to do with technical knowledge or soft skills related.
Exposure
Exposure is embedded in the Tech Leading role for obvious reasons. You’ll be the person facing most of the external stakeholders on a daily basis, that means that you’ll get exposure to most of them and perhaps you’ll also become the voice of the team (an anti-pattern).
Share this voice with your peers, bring them in to these critical conversations and meetings from time to time so that you gain transparency within your team and things such as business pressure become evident.
Influence
In alignment to exposure, we get influence; you get exposure so that you can influence. As Tech Lead you get the chance (very precious and rare indeed) to influence people, on both sides, either this is to influence a decision being taken by external stakeholders or a solution design for a very complex problem within your team.
As with exposure, help your peers and guide them to become influencers (somehow) so that they influence people in order to get things done and benefit the product/project as a whole.
Freedom
You get a copious amount of it. Being free in this context does not mean that you’ll be able to do anything you want, what it means is that you have a huge responsibility now. You get to influence others, so that the product/project succeeds. This is usually the result of using such freedom wisely.
Share such freedom with your team so that it gets distributed evenly throughout a horizontal larger surface. Share this freedom by cultivating trust.
The Not So Good Parts of Working as a Tech Lead
Personal Sacrifice
Be prepared to do some personal sacrifices from your side, and don’t expect recognition for this. You’ll find it surprisingly relevant that as a Tech Lead you’ll be taking most of the bullets for your team in order to keep them focused and prevent emotions that can distract them from excelling at delivery and creativity. Do not expect anybody on your team (nor outside it) to reach out to you and thank you for taking the blame or perhaps for having that extremely hard meeting with a C-Stakeholder no one wants to deal with. Give everything, expect nothing.
Don’t take everything on your own. Share some of this pressure with your team so that they become aware of the reality and the wilderness out there.
Noise Cancelling
I’m not speaking about headphones here, but as a Tech Lead you’ll become a noise cancelling device for your team. Be prepared to filter certain communications or messages that otherwise would create an insecure and emotionally-loaded environment, not nice for productivity matters.
Make sure — without major details — to provide a clear and transparent message in regards to comments out there so that you cultivate awareness within your team. This can be a difficult approach if some of your team members are not able or capable of handling not so positive feedback.
The Spotlight
Having the spotlight on you can be demanding. Usually having the spotlight on you tends to magnify details, such as communication details, the way you interact with your peers, the way you say things, the way you act during meetings, the way you speak up your mind (not very advised), the way you manage risks, the way you deal with complexity, the way you translate a message from technical language to business language. Everything you do tends to be magnified by 10x (if not 100x).
Pay special attention to these details (details make the World). This can be demanding — physiologically and emotionally — , so make sure you speak up your mind from time to time and find people within your team with whom you can speak up without putting makeup on wording nor actions. Try to be you without filters from time to time.
Responsibility and Accountability
There is a huge difference between being responsible and accountable. The prior translates (most of the times) to implementation; the later involves being accountable for projects at scale for technical decisions that can yield very good results or very bad ones depending on how it was executed. And trust me, if the project works that’s fine, but if it fails you’ll be the one to blame (altogether with your manager).
As an advise, make sure everybody understands this differentiation but at the same time give the message that everybody is in the project for the same reason and the same goal. Encourage a team-accountability and ownership that distributes the heavy load.
Do I Like Being a Tech Lead?
Being a Tech Lead has given me the chance to change lives, to understand and meet new people, and perhaps to spoil things up from time to time. It has enabled me to get the message that failure is a critical part of success, to evolve my career and care about improving what has to be improved and continue moving forward. Would I do it again? Yes.
