Typical transition to Tech Lead happens pretty naturally. A precursor to transitioning to Tech Lead role is generally having shown the ability to scope complex tasks, coordinating a small set of engineers towards solving them and unblocking them along the way.

An engineer who is looking to transition to Tech Lead role should start developing a set of skills - being able to execute on complex problems alone is not sufficient.

Mindset Shift

A Tech Lead has an influence over the team. They are often looked upon as role models by other engineers in the team. This requires a mindset shift where a Tech Lead (or, a To Be Tech Lead) should start thinking of team first.

This is not an easy or an instantaneous shift as this broadens the scope significantly from what an engineer was earlier used to doing:

  1. All Team processes (sprints, on-call, documentation etiquette, managing tech debt, team productivity, team sustainability etc.) comes under the ambit. An engineering spirit would start questioning whether the team is doing these effectively or not, are there scope of improvements? Often until now, you have accepted the status quo of the team but now you are expected to improve the status quo.

  2. Tech Lead is equally responsible for the growth of engineers in the team. Often until now, you have been responsible for delivering projects where you have collaborated with engineers in your team and provided them guidance to complete the project. You might not have taken direct interest in growth of an engineer. As a Tech Lead, you need to have a good mental map of each engineer’s strength and areas of development. You should try to strengthen their strengths and allow them opportunities to grow in their areas of development with required guidance.

  3. Tech Lead gets more involved in roadmap shaping, project planning etc. These activities require new skills to be developed. They would also take time away from coding which can also be hard for someone who is at the beginning of the transition.

  4. Tech Lead gets more involved in cross-team collaboration, building consensus on controversial things. It requires to build good social and communication skills to succeed in these activities. These skills take time and participating in such activities to develop.

This is not supposed to be an exhaustive list and neither do a new Tech Lead needs to start doing all of this at once. This is just to bring awareness to various facets of the Tech Lead role. However, I would recommend to start doing few of the above early on if you are looking to make a transition to Tech Lead role.

Domain Expertise

Tech Lead is responsible to make decisions about roadmap, new things to do, whether to prioritize certain tech debt or not etc. Note that you are just not responsible for building a great product but also for defining what product we should build. This would require you to continue building more and more domain expertise of the area, codebase, customers, product etc. It would serve you well to put more emphasis on learning more about these. You should look to find good sources from whom you can learn - internal as well as external, often internet is a vast repository of knowledge and if you find right set of people to follow, you would have great success in your learning curve.

This advice is equally important to Tech Leads who are changing their domain area, e.g. When I moved to Performance Engineering, I benefited (& continues to benefit) a lot from following Performance Engineers & their work at other companies.

References

  1. 5 Things I Learned About Being a Technical Lead