What I talk about when I talk about tech leading
I have been organizing various tech lead trainings at work recently and talking about it a lot in various 1:1’s. I find myself drawing out these things
To me, the number 1 thing that predicts a tech lead’s success by a far margin is her ability to discern, negotiate, and clarify the goal. There is no point building anything if you are not building the right thing. People waste a lot more time building the wrong thing or to the wrong goal than they do on bad technical decisions.
A good PM will make this go a lot easier, but it’s an absolute must that the tech lead fully internalizes and understands the goals. Understanding the goal fully allows you to make good decisions technically and is key to velocity because you will have less communication overhead from constant need for additional context beyond the immediate task. I also believe it is the largest predictor of success because to truly get this right implies lots of qualities that are also critical for successes at the later stages in a project.
Following that, the next most important thing a tech lead can do is propose a sensible path of execution that hits that goal. Note: goal, not deliverable — because a goal can be fulfilled in many different ways.
A tech lead has the responsibility to propose the simplest path forward to a problem, but that doesn’t always mean the shortest path forward. Sometimes that path will seem slightly longer because it takes additional measures to incrementally release to the users for feedback or to guarantee a safer release by having parallel paths of executions — but the point is that taking those additional steps will mitigate the risks of your path spiralling out of control into a detour to the zoo because you didn’t build the right thing or you have all this technical clean up to deal with because you really screwed something up.
A path of execution cannot be viewed as a 100% weighted probability of a single path, single outcome — it’s instead more like a wave of probabilities that is constantly fluctuating. The job at this stage is to sum the weighted probabilities sensibly so you take the measures to minimize that detour to the zoo.
After all that then comes a host of things that are important that people typically talk about when they talk about tech leading. It has to do with how to most effectively follow through on the path that you proposed. It has everything to do with leveraging your team effectively, understanding technical tradeoffs and design for flexibility, recalibrating risks and plans as new information and understanding of the world comes in.
The straight line that you hoped to be a straight line or maybe even does look like a straight line from far away is more like a collection of tiny zigzags. The art of walking that path and leading others through it is also not easy — maybe a post for another time. That sum of weighted probabilities never goes away — it is not a static measurement and is instead a live calculation that you must keep tuning in your head.
A tech lead (in my current job) is not always a senior engineer, but it is a leadership position that requires maturity, discipline, and pattern recognition. If you love thinking about things like this, you would probably also enjoy one of my favorite posts of all times: http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/
