What a Tech Lead is not
- A manager of the engineers on the team. The team, including the Tech Lead, reports to the Engineering Manager who typically sits outside the team. As such the Tech Lead role is in no way a management role.
- The most senior engineer. A Tech Lead needs a certain level of seniority, Senior Developer and up, but they are not as a default the most senior nor the most seasoned engineer on the team. It’s rather a matter of the right skills than the seniority of them. Many teams will have a Senior Tech Lead, but also a principal or staff-level engineer.
- A full-time leader. The Tech Lead role is a set of added responsibilities to an individual contributing engineer. For some, it’s the first step towards a future in the engineering management track, but it’s neither required nor expected. As a tech lead, you will still code every day.
Tech Lead responsibilities
Main responsibilities
- They care as much about what they build as they care about how they build it. As a tech lead the core difference from a normal engineer on the team is that you are expected to use a lot of your time doing product discovery and shaping in close collaboration with the Product Manager and Product Designer.
The Tech Lead’s main responsibility in discovery is feasibility, we need to ensure what is feasible and not as early as possible in the discovery process.
- Get in front of real customers and watch them interact with your products. This is where magic happens. The Tech Lead, in contrast to the other engineers on the team, is expected to take an active part in conversations with customers. They are driven and motivated by these conversations. A good sign is that you chose to become an engineer to solve users’ problems, and you know you will do this better if you talk to the users directly.
- Keep track of new technology. All engineers are expected to do this, but as a Tech Lead, it is even more important. When you talk to users, you need to take the learnings you drive about new technologies into the conversations and use that as an enabler for the solutions to the problems you identify together with the PM and Designer. This is where innovation happens and the most important part of the tech lead role.
- Own tech debt. The Tech Lead owns the tech debt in the team. How much, what should be solved, what is okay to sustain and when do we take on new debt. The Tech Lead is responsible for working with the team triad to make sure tech debt gets prioritised and shaped for betting tables.
- You're still an individual contributor: Writing code is still an essential part of your role. You'll have to be more mindful of how, along with your added responsibilities you can still drive an impact on our codebase. Tackle complex technical challenges, providing solutions and guidance on how to approach difficult problems. Taking part in designing the system architecture and making key technical decisions is a must. Debug and troubleshoot critical issues that arise during development and ensure code quality and adherence to best practices.
- Setting the tone: As a tech lead you should embody the traits of high performers at AutoUncle. Displaying strong technical skills and knowledge is but a part of the bigger picture. How you show up to the team matters and your behaviour influences the team's work ethic and attitudes (particularly during challenging times). Enthusiasm and optimism can be contagious as well as fostering a healthy communication culture encourages team members to voice their ideas, concerns, and questions. In essence, you are the positive enabler.
- The odd one in: As a tech lead you possess a unique strength - You sit with the knowledge of both worlds, product and engineering. This is an incredible advantage when shaping and writing pitches as it allows you to provide insights unknown to anyone else in the triad. Designing a buildable solution involves many technical considerations and with this superpower, you'll be able to more accurately estimate what is feasible to achieve within a cycle.
Secondary Responsibilities
- Lead delivery. You will be working together with engineers and designers to take bets from the shaping phase and into the real world. You will only have the bandwidth to do this if you believe in empowering the engineers on the team and a slim process. When we Shape well, we will have less grooming and roadmap tinkering.
- Own bug process and prioritisation. You aid in prioritisation of what bugs are solved now vs later. You make sure there is a prioritised list of bugs for cool-down and that we balance product quality with business priorities. You also make sure your team have a bug process that fits your product context and that works well for both your team, stakeholders and customers.
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