When I joined Reddit in late 2016, I was faced with a unique challenge: tripling the size of the engineering organization within a year. At the time there were about 35 engineers on the team and a small number of “tech leads,” but there was little in the way of official management structure in engineering.

In fact, the very first question in the very first meeting with my new team was “what do managers even do?” I’d hear many variations of that over the coming weeks and I’m proud to say that with time and patience the question slowly changed. By week 4 it was no longer “what do managers do?” and more like, “what does a VP of Engineering do?” Progress!

Joking aside, we needed to scale and that meant getting more serious about our leadership structure and responsibilities. Eventually, I hit a critical mass of understanding with the team and they were willing to take the leap into identifying managers. But this meant I had to do something about all the “tech leads.”

Before going further, you may be asking yourself “what is a tech lead?” And that is a fantastic question because if you asked it to 5 reasonable people you’d get 14 and a half reasonable answers. That is to say, “tech lead” can mean a lot of different things and the role is highly dependent on where you work.

I remember way way back at the dawn of my career when my management skills were only first beginning bloom. My mentor Kevin took notice and said, “perhaps we should think about making you tech lead.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

His response, “Well… there’s not a clear definition, but the main idea is that by putting the word ‘lead’ into your job title you’ll automatically become a better manager.”

Although he said this jokingly, over the years I’ve never come across a more universally accurate description. That’s why I try to avoid the tech lead title in organizations I build. Do they manage people, manage scrums, manage tech, manage a part of the architecture? The answer to all of these questions is “yes, no, maybe, or it depends.”

It’s hard to scale an organization without clear responsibilities and I needed to find managers fast. For the purposes of this blog post, let’s start with the definition that “tech leads” are either proto-managers or proto-architects. They are ready to take on a broader set of responsibilities but unsure whether they want to oversee people or technology. How do we make the call?

Tech lead in. Manager or architect out.

I took inspiration from a classic film. If you’ve ever watched the movie Blade Runner you probably remember the Voight-Kampff test. At the risk of over-simplifying a cult-classic, Blade Runner is about a futuristic bounty hunter who is tracking down replicants (androids) hiding among the general human population. The idea behind the Voight-Kampff test is that you take someone who looks supposedly human, ask them a few weird questions, measure the responses, and determine whether they are truly human or a technological marvel.

Coincidentally, this is exactly what we needed to accomplish with our tech leads. The best Engineering Managers are interested in people first. The best Architects most fascinated by technology. Human or Android?

But unlike the movie, my approach was not to setup a lie-detector in the office and study tech leads in a lab environment. Instead, I integrated a few exploratory questions into normal 1:1 conversations over the course of several weeks.