Experienced Devs

You need to understand very soon that you can no longer have projects assigned to you. Everything your management asks you to do is actually something that they want you to ensure gets finished- you are not supposed to do it yourself. Delegate, follow up, and guide someone else to do it.

The moment you take a project on by yourself, you’ve become a huge bottleneck for your entire team’s productivity. Your team needs your guidance and help, and you can’t offer that if you’re designing, coding, and debugging a project on your own.

98% of coding for you should be paired programming from here on out, where you are not the developer at the keyboard. You are providing suggestions and guidance so that experience can transfer to your junior team members.

Edit: You are not just a “tech lead,” you are a manager if you have direct reports.

Hope you like Jira, confluence, and neverending meetings.

Keep faking it, everyone else is too.

Set up 1on1s with your team. Weekly or biweekly, depending on level and team size.

The other, most important task is to delegate. Learn how to identify when you should step back and let your team solve a problem. Lead from the front, but start to learn how to effectively delegate. This is the thing I’ve seen many others struggle with as they get promoted.

You are no longer a dev. You are now your team. Your future success depends on not only your own performance, but your whole team.

I highly recommend the book First Among Equals. It's specifically about running a team of developers and managing them well. I found it full of good ideas and it's specific to tech as well, it's not just general management advice.

Tech Lead means different things at different companies. You say you have direct reports, do you mean you do their performance evaluations or not? If so then I'd call that a manager. To me that's where the difference is. If you handle any of the "HR" parts of the process (for lack of a better term) then that's a manager.

I ask what you mean because the advice differs.

For example, I was a tech lead but not a manager. It was sort of funny, sometimes my team would ask me if it was okay if they took off or left early and I'd explain to them that "I'm not your boss" lol. Basically I'd tell them I have no problems with it but I'm not really the person who can grant that or whatever. The sort of role a tech lead has (at least in the context I was in) was maybe something like a team captain. If folks didn't have specific tasks in the sprint they wanted to work on I'd assign it to them. Most folks never really had a preference but I never wanted to seem like I was being bossy.

Join us at [email protected]

The community is still small but you can ask questions and there are some good resources there already.

Also start improving your “management” skills. Someone recently linked me this list, there are some great resources for senior devs/tech leads on there as well: https://github.com/kuchin/awesome-cto

For me tech leadership is mostly about making the team run as efficiently as possible. Code reviews, pair programming, 1 on 1s, facilitating design discussions, etc

I also talk more with architects, product management etc and prepare the work for the team on a feature level. This also gives me opportunity to delegate part of the work so others can grow too.

Your new job is to regularly listen to your direct reports and help them succeed. You will do less of your own work. Don't work more to offset. Consider taking notes or making to-do lists to keep track of your tasks.

Good luck, congrats!

I enjoyed the book "Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager"

StaffEng is a great resource for "how the fuck do I staff engineer", including tech lead:

https://staffeng.com/guides/operating-at-staff/

Have fun spelling shit out for the product owner.

Sincerely, A product owner

Schedule monthly 1 on 1s, set individual goals to help them when review time comes.

Welcome to hell.

Middle Management type of jobs are demanding and frustrating. You have to keep your superiors happy, and also keep a close relationship with your team members. It's not an easy role to keep everything balanced.

If you manage to slowly work your way up in the corporate ladder, things might become better.