The Manager's Path - pykello/pykello.github.com GitHub Wiki

Tech Lead

Qualities

• Good communicator: write clear documents, give presentations without melting down, explain to people in different teams and roles about what's going on.
• Good at Prioritizing: Eager to push work forward and decide what needed to be done next.
• Pragmatic Urgency is the deciding factor.

Example of bad tech lead. Amazing engineer who hated talking with people and often distracted by technical details. PM took advantage of her absence and prioritized poorly designed features, while she was chasing after the next big refactor.

Standards:

• Regular 1-1 touchbases
• Scale themselves by delegating work effectively without micromanaging.
• Focus is on whole team's productivity.
• Partner effectively with product, analytics, and other areas of business.

Major new technical skill: Project Management

The worst scheduling mistake is to allow yourself to be pulled into random meetings.

Main roles of a tech lead:

• System architect and business analyst
• Project planner
  • Break down project into rough deliverables
  • One part of challenge: Get as much parallel work done as possible
• Software developer & team leader