A Tech Lead HOWTO

I’ve been working in a Tech Lead role position for something more than 2.5 years. Some notes I can write here that would have been useful for me and hopefully for someone reaching this page:

Read this HN question comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395046
Create a roadmap, parallel to the team projects. Make sure you have a long-term plan in mind.
Your team needs to fulfill the projects maintaining a good working environment, otherwise, they’ll burn out soon. The opposite is true too, it does matter having the happiest team if projects don’t evolve as they should.
Be patient, start just with little improvements as you understand your area. Avoid revolution feeling, people don’t like too many changes at the same time.
Coding is probably not the most important thing you’ll do for your team. First months it will feel awkward but you’ll get used to it once you understand your responsibilities.
Understand your area top-down, from architecture to code so you’ll probably won’t be an expert in every repo but you probably should be an expert of how everything glues together, how the architecture works and how it should evolve.
1:1s are one of the most important things you’ll do, make sure most of the 1:1 time is just informal, the projects sync part should be just the first 5 minutes. Try fixing calendar events for them.
Overcommunicate: tell important things to the team as a group and repeat it again in each 1:1 and see if your message is being understood. Always ask for the opinion, especially in 1:1s, your mates will often help you to do things better.
Be data driven, make sure you can see the state of everything with data, you should not need to do ad-hoc queries or launching dirty scripts to gather important health data. Your important telemetrics and KPIs should always be available to be reviewed. However, if you find yourself checking a metric a lot for certain thresholds, just create an alarm!
You’ll need to keep caring about your craftsmanship and it will be more difficult than ever as you won’t be coding most of the day. However, you should make sure you keep improving technically, not just growing in soft skills. Try maintaining pet-projects, courses and try to contribute to team code in small priority tasks from time to time.
Be involved in code reviews and read every pull request if possible, that’s where you’ll feel how good work is evolving. However, avoid micro-manage, especially to senior mates, just be a helpful safety net if needed. Avoid commenting in CRs if you have nothing important to say, avoid the “here comes the boss comment” syndrome.
Detect any block and tackle it with most urgency. It’s one of your main responsibilities. Ask for blocks in every standup.
Be the tech proxy for your team so that they can focus on their tasks. Be ready to be interrupted, learn how to optimize context changes. Actually, make sure your team understands you’re approachable and they can ping you if any problem without waiting, you’re there to be interrupted at any time if needed.
Supervise estimations. Avoid being always dummy conservative, think carefully about risks and if any high risk then yes, be conservative with estimation. But if you’re estimating a task your team already did in the past, it should be pretty straightforward (and perhaps should be automated?)
Try introducing and welcome changes to how things are done but be careful about when those changes are applied as if they impact a project, it can be difficult to justify. Related to this, avoid taking the easy route of just saying always “NO” to new things just to avoid risks, as your platform should evolve as part of your plan.
Measure technical debt, buy it consciously and fight it as part of your plan with priorities.
Improve your soft skills. You’ll be more time talking to people than to your IDE.
Be always constructive with feedback, as a criticism without action points to follow is not a solution.
Be the Toxic-comments goalkeeper. Try favoring a positive environment. However, don’t confuse toxic comment with a constructive critic.
Tech Lead position is quite prone to workaholism. Go home! Read this post by Rafael López: https://badoo.com/techblog/blog/2017/04/11/leads-go-home-and-take-your-reports-with-you/