The Software Engineer's Guidebook

TAKEAWAYS

In the tech lead role you need to balance several things at once:

• Leading a project or an engineering team
• Empowering team members, as well as helping remove blockers
• Keeping in the loop stakeholders, product, and perhaps even your manager
• Being a role model when doing individual contributor (IC) work like coding, code reviews, and being oncall

All this is not easy to balance; it takes time, practice, and some trial and error.

Lead by example. In the tech lead role, the rest of the team will expect you to lead by example, even if this expectation isn’t explicit. As a tech lead, you should be hands-on enough to take part in planning, writing code, doing code reviews, and joining the oncall rotation if there is ...