How to Tech Lead as former software engineer

Have you been promoted? Here’s how your life will change 😈

Hey senior software engineer 👋. Have you just become a team leader? That’s great news. Congratulations! Now say goodbye to your favorite IDE, because it’s not a promotion, it’s an entirely new journey.

Before you become a leader, your process of software engineering can be similar to this:

You have a list of tasks or challenges to handle. You pick the most important one. Or three — as a software engineer, especially in a senior role, we like to do three things at the same time.

So our plate usually has three things “in progress”. And whenever any of them is done, we add a new brick into the software we build.

Then we pick another task.

When you are “promoted” to a leader’s position, in the beginning, the process doesn’t change much. There are still tasks to do, and the software to build. But because it’s the next step in your career ladder, you now don’t do three things at a time. You do five.

But for the company, it’s still not enough. Now they expect you to handle ten things at the time 😲.

“That’s nothing”, you say. You love coding so that you will do ten somehow. Or eight, leaving two of them to your teammate.

The worse part is that now, next to your tasks, you have your team. Hungry for progress, those are people who will continuously have not enough things to do. And this is really bad for you. Instead of focusing on your plate, you also need to think about how to keep them busy. And keep them motivated, happy, and believing (in the company’s mission and values).

And this is a neverending distraction for you.

Wait. Is it?

And the work delegation isn’t just a privilege that helps with lowering your workload. Effective delegation is now your job.

Your team always comes first, even before “your” tasks.

When you finally learn how to delegate, soon, you will realize that your work finally scales up. That’s great! You’ve just unlocked a new level as a leader 🏅.

Then you will see that it isn’t over. Because when you stopped contributing to day-to-day product development too early, the direction may likely be not clear enough. Bricks are delivered, but you and your team aren’t any closer to the desired final solution.

And here comes another thing for you — technology leadership. To lead people effectively, you need to broaden your perspective and shape long term goals for your technology stack. Your product evolves, so the same with your code. The project becomes more complex; more people contribute; more things can be automated or simplified — all for keeping the development smooth and efficient.

An interesting thing here is that you can lead technology even without having the official team. It sometimes happens that you become a leader without any people reporting directly to you. There can be another team depending on your solutions or even the entire company.

But when you build your tech stack with your team, you need to make sure that it is not only you making decisions and shaping long term goals. Your team needs to understand them, and even more — they should actively shape them with you. It matters a lot because all of you can have different perspectives. You can have a broad vision of your company’s needs, and your engineers know how to provide those things efficiently. Together you will achieve something great!

Now, if you have a tech stack vision, and you distribute the workload effectively to your team members, can there be anything better?

Yes, definitely! It’s pretty likely, you are now the most problematic part. According to the theory of constraints (read the excellent book — “The Goal” by E. Goldratt), “every group is only as strong or successful as its weakest or least successful member”.

Simple math — if everything (tasks, decisions, conversations) needs to go through you, the team will be limited by the number of things you can handle.

Have you ever felt the pressure that you are too slow with delivering tasks to your teammates? This is exactly it.

And here, another leadership thing comes to light — leading processes or “leading change” (Google it! 🙂 ).

The best thing you can do as an impactful leader is to unlock possibilities so your team can work effectively without you.

It is not an easy thing — you cannot just step away into the shadow and wait until things start working. In fact, “change” can be a full-time job for you — aligning strategic priorities between teams (your and “others”), resolving conflicts, questioning the status quo, inspiring the engagement.

And whenever you start thinking that everything works perfectly, take two weeks of vacation, without the access to your company’s email.

When you come back, you will see which places you still block your team from moving on.

Fast forward — what if technology and processes are perfect at the moment? Then you should never forget about your people.

Are they happy? Do they have a clear self-development plan? And the very important thing — are they just individual contributors, or they act (and feel!) like team members. All of those is another big part for you — leading people (next to technology and change).