What it Takes to Be a Great Technical Leader (with Engineering Director)

What is a Technical Leader? [01:02]

• The path to becoming a technical leader often starts as an individual contributor, progressing to taking on more responsibilities.
• In different companies, the role of a "tech lead" can vary significantly.
• A common industry observation is the "product trio" concept, comprising a product manager, product designer, and tech lead, operating within a cross-functional "product squad."

The underlying assumption is there's a squad right or a team typically we call it a product squad which is a cross-functional squad with all these different roles represented in them.

The Role of the Tech Lead in the Product Trio [04:11]

• The primary responsibility of a technical lead within the product trio is to own and answer the question of "feasibility" – is a concept possible to build?
• Tech leads engage in discovery and architectural work to design experiments that objectively assess feasibility within constraints like team size and budget.
• They balance the risks of over-engineering and under-engineering, considering diverse aspects to inform their decisions.

And it's up to the engineer to make that possible or even answer the question is it possible right.

Stakeholder Collaboration and Context [05:50]

• A crucial aspect of a tech lead's role involves communicating and collaborating extensively with stakeholders.
• This collaboration helps in understanding key business challenges and how technology can provide solutions.
• The approach to technology solutions can differ based on company stage: early-stage companies might prioritize speed and low cost, while established companies focus on scalability for larger user bases.

Hey what are some of the key business challenges that are happening now and how can technology be part of that answer.

Preventing Single Points of Failure [07:08]

• To ensure team resilience, it's vital to avoid single points of failure, especially concerning individuals.
• This often happens when one engineer becomes overly specialized in a particular feature or code area, making the team heavily reliant on them.
• The "hit by a bus" factor highlights the risk if a critical team member becomes unavailable, impacting the team's ability to progress.

The main thing that you want is to have good practices around documentation and everything what you want is this you don't want single points of failure like especially when it comes to people right.

Effective Documentation and Knowledge Sharing [09:40]

• Tribal knowledge can be beneficial if it's well-distributed and decisions are properly documented.
• Tools like Jira and GitHub can be leveraged, with pull requests titled to include ticket numbers for clear traceability.
• Squashing commits into a single, clean list linked to tickets provides a historical record of work done and the context behind decisions.

So if there are any designs hopefully they're linked on that jira board and everything so that's the kind of thing those are the kinds of processes that a tech lead can help introduce.

The Importance of Soft Skills and Communication [13:08]

• Beyond hard technical skills, a technical leader needs to develop soft skills, often referred to as "human skills," to advance their career.
• Good communication and effective expectation setting are paramount for being a good technical leader and a well-rounded professional.
• These skills impact those around you, making collaboration and relating to others critical for success.

You know so by the time an engineer becomes a tech lead for the first time uh they spent a few years learning what it's like to be an engineer right and by now you know that the hard skills you've picked up along the way are crucial.

Accountability Through Expectations [14:25]

• Accountability starts with setting clear expectations; individuals cannot be held accountable for uncommunicated tasks or goals.
• Clearly communicating and agreeing on expectations, including timelines and the nature of the solution (e.g., scalable versus proof-of-concept), is an undervalued skill.
• A lack of open communication and clear expectations can lead to an unhealthy team environment.

My CTO of the company I work he talks a lot about this and and I absolutely agree it always says accountability starts with setting expectations.

Taking Ownership as a Technical Leader [15:54]

• A technical leader's ownership is about leading the technology and setting its direction, not necessarily managing people directly.
• Ownership means taking responsibility for the technology, which is built and monitored by people.
• This includes proactively monitoring systems, such as APIs, and initiating scaling or other necessary actions without waiting for explicit prompts from leadership.

When there's a problem, I need you as the tech lead to own it.

Empathy in Technical Leadership [18:28]

• Empathy is crucial for technical leaders, fostering an understanding of the emotions and reactions of others, both within the team and among users.
• It's important to set clear expectations regarding monitoring and response to alerts, acknowledging that technology is built and monitored by people.
• Empathy involves understanding that team members cannot read minds and that explicit communication is necessary for agreement and clarity.

So, as a tech lead, I was talking about ownership a minute ago and you can't and again communication expectation settings as the ultimate owner of that piece of the technology, it's totally okay for you to say hey as an example if there's an alert right.

Understanding Producers and Consumers of Technology [21:03]

• When empathy and a healthy team dynamic are effectively established internally, it naturally extends to having empathy for the end-users of the technology.
• Technical leaders, while not directly managing people, must understand human behavior, recognizing that engineers, though logical, need to grasp that technology is built by and for people.
• This internal empathy for producers translates to a better understanding and care for the consumers of the technology.

If we care about each other internally, it creates an environment where it's very possible and achievable to also care deeply about the people using the products that we build.

Empathy in Practice: Customer Interviews [22:37]

• Empathy enables better perspective-taking, both for team members at different skill levels and for understanding product consumers.
• Tech leads are expected to participate in customer interviews with product managers and designers to deeply understand those impacted by the technology being built.
• This context and empathy should then be transferred to the rest of the team, fostering a shared understanding among the producers of the technology.

This plays out in customer interviews as well that's one of the things that I expect my tech leads to do.