Leveling Up as a Tech Lead

Foreword

In my first role as a tech lead, a long time ago now, it felt like I was given a blank map and told to chart a course through unknown lands. I had no guide, no proven path, and no certainty that I was heading in the right direction. I had no idea what “good” looked like in this role. Somehow, I must have done something right, because a few years later, I was asked to run tech lead training for my colleagues at Thoughtworks, which eventually grew into a global program. During that time, I realized my struggles were not unique. Many others faced the same uncertainty with very few resources to support them. When I searched for books to recommend, I found only three. Two were management-focused books, and only one of those, Becoming a Technical Leader by the late Gerald Weinberg (Dorset House), truly addressed technical leadership. More than a decade ago, I wrote Talking with Tech Leads (CreateSpace) to help fill that gap.

Since publishing that book, I have trained thousands of tech leads, engineering managers, and staff engineers and coached dozens of CTOs. Over that time, our industry has shifted dramatically. We moved from on-premises to cloud-based software, from desktop to web to mobile, and from big-bang releases to continuous delivery. Yet, despite these changes, newly appointed tech leads keep asking the same questions, such as What is expected of me? Where should I be spending my time? How much hands-on coding should I be doing?

While these fundamental questions ...