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What Makes a Great Technical Lead?
Clearing roadblocks, people management, mentoring and always learning
Whether it’s a defined role in your team or someone who is simply your best developer person on the team, we all need strong Technical Leads to get the job done. When you’re a manager of multiple products and projects on a variety of platforms you can’t know everything about everything, lead a team, keep your stakeholders in the loop, work with customer support, etc, etc.
In short, you the Manager cannot do it all and you need people on your team you can be proficient in different technologies and platforms of your deliverables that can be your “goto people” for answers when you need to ensure you’re saying the right thing.
Dave is the Azure Function expert.
Jenny knows React better than anyone.
Caroline is the best person to have in the room when talking about scaling up apps.
If you’re a new manager, you might see this as a threat to your status-quo because you used to be this person, and now you are not, you are something else, you are leading a team, and now someone else needs to fill your shoes. A manager who can’t let go of the Technical Lead role will invariably hold their team back for the simple reason of — how many of us can handle two full-time jobs concurrently and not screw one up.
Oftentimes, what holds the manager back from letting go of the reigns to the Technical Lead is that the guidance to the Technical Lead is immensely ambiguous and generalist, i.e., “you own the web”!
So what does a Tech Lead do?
They Have to Talk to People
The most common misconception about Tech Leads is that they don’t talk to people and we assume that they are surrounded by IDEs and compilers, carrying on conversations on the daily with algorithms and functions.
Technical Leads talk to people, scary good Technical Leads talk to lots of them. Whether it’s answering questions to Product Management on what is/is not possible, fielding critical security fixes from customers, or consulting with developers in their team and possibly other teams, Technical Leads talk to everyone.
