The primary responsibility of a tech lead
What is the main thing a tech lead should focus on? A tech lead’s responsibilities are legion, from understanding the product backlog, working with cross-team dependencies, helping design the system architecture, writing and reviewing code, developing junior developers, hiring, one-to-ones, appraisals, retrospectives…and so the list goes on.
It can often feel like you are so pulled from pillar to post that it is difficult to be an expert in any of these areas. We often fall into the trap that we need to be the expert in all the things we do. We think we need to be the best developer on the team, the best coach for junior developers etc. Secretly we all know that we don’t need to be the best in the team at all these roles — we should in fact be hiring and developing people to far exceed us, but this can lead us to feel a bit redundant. What do we do if we’ve hired developers who are better than us, better coaches than us, better architects than us? Do we need to find a new job at this point and start again?
I’ve recently read the 4 Obsessions of an extraordinary executive which gave me some insight into this. I’d highly recommend reading the book, but in essence, it suggests the best leaders focus on developing culture. I believe the one thing a Tech Lead can bring to a team that is difficult for another team member to lead on, is developing and guarding the culture of the team. The culture of a team is probably the single most important factor that will determine a team’s success. No matter how talented or driven the individual members may be, without a sound culture, they will never gel as a team and perform as they might. Equally, if you have an underperforming team, investigating and building a stronger, more effective culture will be crucial if the team is to be turned around.
A strong culture enables new ideas to be surfaced without fear of them being shot down. Mistakes can be made and they will be analysed with the goal of learning, not assigning blame. Talented people share their expertise with other members, rather than holding on to it. The success of the team is seen as more important than the success of any one individual.
The kind of culture we may chose to build, and the techniques we can use to change culture are the subject of another post (coming later) but for the moment I love the idea of my primary role being to set a culture in my team that enables all these amazing people we’ve hired to deliver their best.
