The Role of the Tech Lead
A short, practical guide
This is a definition of “tech lead” that I have found useful, but the role varies from company to company and even from team to team, so your mileage may vary. Some of these responsibilities can be distributed among individual engineers or shouldered by the engineering manager, so not every tech lead fills every responsibility listed here.
What is a tech lead?
On a project team with multiple software engineers, the tech lead owns timely, responsible execution with high quality and sustainable workloads. While the tech lead is not tasked with unilaterally making all decisions, they are the technical point of contact and spokesperson, and are responsible for framing and leading discussions and collecting the input of the engineering team.
The tech lead has specific responsibilities other than coding. While all members of the team will also contribute to these ends, appointing a clear owner ensures that they aren’t overlooked. Since fulfilling these responsibilities is a significant time commitment, we expect that the tech lead will be writing less code than when they were an individual contributor (expect at least 30–40% bandwidth reduction). The intention is for them to empower the team to better handle technical challenges, rather than personally do the most crucial and delicate technical work.
A tech lead is explicitly appointed. An engineer does not automatically become the tech lead by having the most seniority, most domain expertise, or highest code output.
Why Should You Appoint a Tech Lead?
- Reduce bystander effect and decision/indecision by consensus by naming an explicit owner
- Ensure technical representation in planning and prioritization
- Make clearer, faster decisions and distribute information more effectively
- Enable engineering managers to scale to multiple projects
Not all projects require a tech lead and the engineering manager often serves as the default tech lead on projects staffed by junior engineers. However, all major projects (>3 engineers or >6 months) should probably have an explicitly named tech lead.
Tech Lead Responsibilities
Technical Representation in Planning
- Feasibility: Deeply think through the product and its technical feasibility and implications. Proactively flag and de-risk any technical issues that might greatly affect the product’s launch or maintainability.
- Architecture: Own the technical architecture of the project / feature. Consider different approaches, then drive consensus. Be the final decision maker to unblock the team when there is no easy answer.
- Costing: Be the technical input to sprint planning and reviews. Provide time estimates for tasks to create an accurate schedule. Push back on unrealistic schedules.
- Scope: In conjunction with PM, manage the scope of the work to ensure the project can ship with high quality and manageable engineering workload. Flag to managers if issues arise during the course of execution that change that calculation.
Engineering Quality Championship
- Stability, reliability, and maintainability: Ensure that any risks are taken knowingly. Identify and mitigate areas of risk (capacity planning, security reviews, quality metrics, monitoring and alerting).
- Bug triage: Own incoming triage and the task backlog, and follow up on any outage or issues (improve debugging, prevention of future issues, etc.)
- Code quality: Review code, push back on risky changes and bad abstractions and encourage others to do the same.
- Testing: Define test strategy and coverage standards, and ensure the team is following these guidelines.
- Accountability: Define and uphold an appropriate quality bar for the project. Ensure the project is set up to meet the bar and is tracking towards the goal. Take a strong stance if necessary (e.g. cut scope, delay launch).
Project Management
- Task breakdown and assignment: Determine the details of who and how to delegate tasks within the project/team. Generally, the tech lead breaks things down at a high level, and sometimes assigns large areas for another engineer to own and break down.
- Execution: Handle day-to-day issues that come up with project execution. Give the engineering manager and PM feedback if the deadlines or estimate of projects are going to miss.
- Communication: Interface with other teams about technical decisions that might affect others. Keep cross-functional and leadership stakeholders up to date.
- Process Improvement: Update project management processes and tools as needed.
- The buck stops here: Get it shipped. Are we progressing as needed to ship on time? Own the technical details of a project shipping.
Mentorship
- Level up more junior members of the team. Support them to accomplish their tasks and assign them tasks that will stretch their abilities. Be available to answer questions.
- Identify areas of low “bus factor” that are bottle-necked on a single engineer (including self) and alleviate by documenting and training additional engineers.
- Provide feedback to individual engineers. Give low-level feedback via code and design reviews, and high-level feedback one-on-one. Provide ongoing feedback on individuals to the engineering manager as an input to their overall career growth.
Non-Responsibilities
- Thinking about career growth for team members
- Headcount planning (though they should play a big part in providing input for it)
- Being the primary cross-functional coordinator for a project
- Personally coding the most technically challenging parts of a project
Conclusion
At the end of the day, these tasks need to get done for a project to ship successfully. While you don’t have to use this definition of tech lead, it does pay to ensure that your team is on the same page about whether or not you need a tech lead, what their responsibilities are if you name one, and who will shoulder the responsibilities if you don’t.
