Engineering Manager / Tech Lead
CTO - You don't have to do anything, but you are responsible for everything
- The tech lead is the owner of the technological vision for a project, and the technical leader of the project team.
- A tech lead is a software engineer, responsible for leading a development team, and responsible for the quality of its technical deliverables
- At the end of the day, it's about making good software with a team
- Achieve tech lead mastery in 3 easy steps:
- Facilitate
- Help your team do their jobs
- Always be asking yourself - What's next
- Remove roadblocks
- Perceive the need
- Tactic #1 - Tickets, hours & burndowns
- Know the answers - Or where to find them
- be a router
- suggest a resource
- tell keywords for searching in google
- It's fine to admit not knowing something but never ever as an excuse. "I don't know,' should burst joyfully from your lips, followed by 'but I will find out!'
- Advocate
- Keep the big picture in mind
- You need to have the 10,000 foot view in your head, so you can make good decisions about what to do on the ground.
- Try to know whys of the decision and not only what
- Tactic #2 - Write down everything
- send recap emails
- How to advocate when talking to
- Developers - finish in few weeks so don't overengineer
- Always tell developers why we are doing this
- Management
- Advocate for developers
- Clients
- No but
- Will take 3 more weeks
- Will take 10K more
- Let me explore and get back to you
- No but
- Just say NO to feature creep (That's advocating for the project)
- Developers - finish in few weeks so don't overengineer
- Motivate
- Guide your team to the best possible result
- Intrinsic motivation
- First key to motivation
- Your attitude - You set the tone for the team
- Never let developers take blame
- Tactic #3 - Passive-aggressive whiteboarding
- Your attitude - You set the tone for the team
- Tech lead paradox - You're not writing the code, but you shoulder the responsibility for it.
- Minimize Risk
- Go after the parts that scare you the most
- Hunt for answers until you aren't scared
- It can be hard to code when you're a tech lead
- Coders work on the maker's schedule
- But TL's are on the manager's schedule
- Growth Opportunities
- Bored people quit
- Facilitate
- Remove blockers
- Empower your team
- Share credit, take blame
- Never devalue people
- Be vulnerable and authentic
- Prioritize and focus
- Invest in your communication skills
- Senior tech lead
- The world willl no longer be binary
- You don't need to have all the answers
- I don't know. Let's ask someone or find someone who knows
- Your role is not to be liked by everyone
- If you try to please all, you please none
- You are not alone
- Non-technical areas are also important
- People are complex
- You can't do everything yourself
- Use the situational leadership model
Tech Leadership
The six main KRAs of Tech Leadership
- Technology Performance: System uptime, latency, time for issue detection and resolution.
- Product Development: Time to market. Code quality. Bug introduction rate.
- Team Development: Time to full productivity and average experience of productive hires. Retention rates of employees. Switching time, costs and risk.
- Cost Efficiency: The costs of shipping a story point or release, cost per productive developer and cost per additional customer.
- Security & Compliance: Protect customer data. Lower security incident rates. Ensure successful compliance audits.
- Strategic Impact: Drive revenue growth and minimize risks with leanness, agility and scalability.
5 skills to develop to grow from Senior to Staff Engineer
- Extreme Ownership
- Ruthless Execution
- Sees chaos as a ladder
- Malleability
- Non-ambiguous Communicator
Story
At Microsoft, a junior engineer spent 3 days solving a simple caching issue. Her manager knew he could do it in 10 minutes. But he didn't.
Do the math.
Most leaders would have jumped in. Solved it fast. Moved on.
But fast solutions come at a hidden cost: Growth debt.
Every time you step in, you rob your team of the lessons they need to grow.
Over time, that debt compounds.
Engineers stop thinking for themselves. The team relies on you to ship. Growth slows to a crawl.
The best engineering leaders don’t write the best code.
They code the best culture.
Next time your fingers itch to jump in, ask yourself:
Are you fixing the problem or adding to your team’s debt?
Links
https://mfi.engineering/money-forward-i-engineering-2021-43e473dca440
https://mfi.engineering/money-forward-i-engineering-2022-9f5c8549798c
CTO Checklist. Being an engineering leader comes in… | by Tom Neal | Medium