Tips For Transitioning From Software Engineer To Tech Lead

The main role of a Tech Lead is to provide technical guidance to engineers on their team and to help the engineers build software systems. That being said, Tech Leads find themselves at the nexus of software engineers, software architects, product managers in order to gain all of the context necessary to provide the best possible technical guidance. Because Tech Leads interface with so many other roles, they need to both have solid foundational engineering skills and gain the skills necessary to work well with other engineers, architects, and product managers. If being a Tech Lead is something that interests you, here are a few tips to help you get that role.

Gain Deep System Knowledge

Tech Leads absolutely must know the codebase they are working with like the back of their hand. Typically, the Tech Lead on the team will be the one who has the most context for not only how the code works, but also why the code was built to work the way it does. Tech Leads also have a handle on which parts of their codebase are a little crusty and in need of improvements. When the time comes to modify code that could use some work, Tech Leads are ready to guide their team on what exactly they can do to make that code better. As an engineer looking to become a tech lead, implementing the requirements given to you should not be your sole focus. You should also use each feature you build as an opportunity to gain more knowledge of the peripheral systems.

Understand Product Ownership

For Tech Leads to properly guide engineers to build software, they need to have an understanding of the role of Product Owners. Tech Leads often will meet with Product Owners to verify requirements of a feature before an engineer will work on that feature. To be effective in these meetings, Tech Leads have to put on their Product hat so that they understand the features from a product perspective and can communicate that perspective to their engineers. Additionally, Tech Leads need to understand Product Ownership well enough to know when a decision should be an engineering decision or a product decision. If you are looking to become a Tech Lead, you should take the time to learn about what the Product Owners on your team do and ask a lot of questions to understand the process they go through to get from an idea to a set of product requirements.

Keep Engineering Skills Sharp

When someone transitions from a Software Engineer to a Tech Lead, they do not give up all of their engineering responsibilities. They will often continue to serve as an individual contributor with a portion of their time. Tech Leads will also do a lot of code reviews and will pair with the engineers on their team to help unblock them from the technical challenges they are facing, so Tech Leads need to maintain strong engineering skills in order to be effective when pairing on blockers or reviewing code. Some engineers become engineers because they love writing code! The Tech Lead role gives these engineers that love writing code an advancement opportunity outside of the Engineering Manager role which pulls them further away from coding.

I hope this article helped you understand the Tech Lead role. Thanks for reading!