So You Want To Be a Tech Lead: The Brutally Honest Guide to Surviving and Thriving

You’ve shipped features, crushed tickets, and quietly fixed three production issues at 2 a.m. before anyone noticed. Now the title change is knocking: Tech Lead. It sounds like a promotion. It is—but not the kind you think. The job shifts from “I write the code” to “I am accountable for outcomes,” and that one word—accountable—changes almost everything.

If your mental picture of leadership looks like a clean diagram in an onboarding deck, prepare to redraw it on a napkin at 1 a.m. The reality lives in the messy middle: people dynamics, political weather, technical bets, and the gnawing doubt that you’re doing it wrong. Here’s the truth: most tech leads feel that way at first. The difference between the ones who burn out and the ones who build something real comes down to habits, clarity, and a few unglamorous skills they don’t teach in school.

Let’s dig into what this role really takes—and how to wield it without losing your soul.

What a Tech Lead Really Does (Hint: It’s Not Just “The Best Coder”)

The word “lead” tricks people into thinking it’s a senior engineer who writes more code. That’s not it. A tech lead is a force multiplier. Your job is to set direction, create clarity, lower friction, and ensure the team ships reliable value—consistently. You still code, but you code strategically: prototypes, gnarly core paths, risk-reducing spikes, or incidents where your presence unblocks the team. The rest? You’re orchestrating.

Key responsibilities: – Define and communicate the technical plan: the “why” and the “how,” at the right altitude for engineers, product, and leadership. – Protect the team: stonewall chaos, simplify priorities, and say “not now” to good ideas that would sink the sprint. – Make better decisions, faster: tradeoffs, constraints, and the courage to commit. – Build the system around the system: testing discipline, code review norms, tooling, incident routines—those lift the baseline. – Grow people: feedback, pairing, assigning work that stretches but doesn’t snap.

Yes, it’s a lot. But the leverage is real: when you multiply a team’s effectiveness by even 10%, that’s an outsized win.

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The Hard Shift: From Builder to Multiplier

As an IC, you optimize for throughput: pull requests merged, bugs squashed, tickets closed. As a tech lead, you optimize for system throughput: flow, quality, and predictability across the team. That means your day must look different.

Trade keystrokes for clarity: Instead of writing the feature end-to-end, write the RFC that de-risks it, define slice boundaries, and let others ship.
Reduce cognitive tax: Make decisions visible in a decision log, keep architecture choices documented, and standardize repeatables (branching, CI, rollbacks).
Watch feedback loops: Code review turnaround, flaky tests, deploy time, incident MTTR—these are early-warning signals of team health.

This is the mindset shift that breaks many new leads: the dopamine from “I built it” is replaced by “They built it, and I made it possible.” It’s quieter. It’s leadership. If that feels uncomfortable, good—that’s where growth lives.

The Politics You Can’t Ignore (But Can Navigate)

“Politics” sounds gross, but it’s just the human side of systems. Ignore it and you’ll ship late, build the wrong thing, or burn your team out. Manage it and you’ll align expectations, defend focus, and make your engineers look like magicians.

Map the power: Who actually decides? Product manager? Director? Shadow architect? Knowing real authority prevents rework.
Speak two languages: Translate technical risk into business impact (“We’ll ship two weeks late and carry performance debt that will cost 20% more to host”), and translate business goals into engineering priorities.
Own the narrative: Tell the story of tradeoffs early and often. Preempt misunderstandings before they become escalations.
Build alliances: Product wants outcomes; design wants consistency; data wants accuracy; infra wants reliability. You want all of it. You can be the only one who sees the whole board.

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Managing People Without Being Their Manager

You may not own the org chart, but you own the energy in your team room. Influence beats authority when trust is high, and nothing builds trust like consistency.

Run meaningful 1:1s: Not status updates. Ask: What’s unclear? What’s frustrating? Where are you stuck? What should we stop doing?
Give feedback fast and fair: Be specific, focus on behavior and impact, and offer support. “When PRs sit unreviewed, cycle time doubles; here’s how we’ll fix it.”
Create psychological safety: People speak up when it’s safe to be wrong. That’s not vibes—it’s the foundation of high performance per Google’s Project Aristotle (source).
Defend boundaries: No, the team can’t tackle five priorities. No, you don’t ship features during an incident. Yes, you’ll say “no” to protect “yes.”

Here’s why that matters: teams that learn fast beat teams that try to be perfect. Set the conditions for honest learning.

The Tech Lead Operating System: Routines That Compound

Under stress, you won’t rise to the occasion—you’ll fall to your systems. Build routines you can trust.

Weekly cadence: – Monday: Re-validate priorities with product, re-check scope, kill anything that crept in over the weekend. – Midweek: Architecture office hours + unblockers. Review open design docs, make decisions crisp. – Friday: Team demo + retro. Celebrate small wins and identify one friction to remove next week.

Daily practices: – Spend the first hour on clarity work (not inbox): plan, review dashboards, unblock. – Reserve two 90-minute maker blocks; batch meetings around them. – Keep a single decision log: what, why, who decided, next review date.

Engineering health: – Track the four DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change fail rate, MTTR) to keep your delivery engine honest (DORA research). – Use lightweight RFCs for non-trivial changes; timebox feedback windows to prevent analysis paralysis. – Standardize incident roles and postmortems; blameless and actionable beats perfect and performative (SRE postmortem culture).

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Firefights vs. Fire Prevention

You’ll wear a pager or sit close to the folks who do. Incidents are inevitable; repeat incidents are optional.

Before the fire: Agree on SLOs, error budgets, and a rollback plan (Service Level Objectives). Practice incident roles: incident commander, comms, ops, scribe.
During the fire: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Establish the channel, define the incident, name a commander, protect chat from drive-by ideas.
After the fire: Run a blameless postmortem with specific follow-ups and owners. Close the loop publicly.

Prevention is unglamorous: alert tuning, test flakiness hunts, service boundaries, load testing. But your future self will thank you.

Choosing Your Tools, Books, and Playbooks (What to Look For)

There’s no single “right” stack for leadership—but the inputs you consume shape your default moves. Here’s how to evaluate resources before you let them into your operating system.

Look for scar-tissue stories: Theory is useful; field notes are gold. Seek authors who’ve built and broken real systems.
Prioritize repeatable patterns: Cadences, checklists, templates, and decision frameworks that survive stress.
Demand business literacy: Books that translate engineering to outcomes will help you influence beyond your repo.
Check for people-first thinking: Psychological safety, feedback patterns, and stakeholder alignment matter as much as architecture.
Bias toward modern metrics: DORA, SLOs, progressive delivery—if these are missing, you’re reading history, not a playbook.

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Also worth bookmarking: – The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier (O’Reilly) – Atlassian’s Incident Management guide (Atlassian) – Conway’s Law background (Mel Conway)

Red Flags and Survival Patterns Inside Companies

Same title, different jungle. Two firms can look identical from the outside and run like different animals inside. Here are patterns to watch—for both risk and rescue.

Red flags: – Metrics theater: Beautiful dashboards; zero behavior change. Ask, “What decision will this metric drive?” – Hero culture: The same three people save every release. That’s a process smell, not a badge of honor. – Roadmap churn: You’re always 30% done with five things. Expect quality to degrade, morale to follow. – Shadow architects: Decisions made in backchannels. If you’re surprised at standup, you’re not leading—someone else is.

Survival patterns: – Decision clarity: DAO—Documented, Accountable, Observable. Who decided? Why? When will we revisit? – Sane defaults: Templates for RFCS, incident reports, and onboarding cut onboarding time in half. – Honest retros: The only rule—name the hard thing. One action item per retro beats eight nobody follows through on. – Clean interfaces: Both in code and org chart. Remember Conway’s Law: your system mirrors your communication structure.

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A 90-Day Plan for New Tech Leads

You won’t fix everything in a quarter, and you don’t need to. Aim for steady state plus one or two foundational wins.

Days 1–30: Listen, map, and de-risk – Schedule 1:1s with every engineer, PM, designer, and adjacent lead. Ask about friction, clarity, and proud moments. – Shadow on-call or incident reviews to learn failure modes. – Draft a team charter: mission, interfaces, and how we decide. – Publish a written “Definition of Ready” and “Definition of Done.”

Days 31–60: Make work flow – Introduce a weekly RFC hour and a two-stage design review (problem framing, then solution). – Tackle the biggest source of friction (e.g., flaky tests or review latency) with a timeboxed task force. – Start tracking DORA metrics; share baseline without blame.

Days 61–90: Ship visible wins – Deliver one meaningful project end-to-end with crisp scope and demo. – Formalize incident roles and run a simulated incident. – Coach two engineers with stretch assignments and clear success criteria. – Write your 90-day review: what changed, what didn’t, what’s next.

Real Talk: What This Role Will Do to You

You’ll develop a risk radar. You’ll also probably develop a little insomnia. Here’s how to keep your humanity while being an effective tech lead.

Boundaries aren’t optional: If you answer every ping instantly, you teach the world your time is free.
“Not now” is a leadership sentence: Focus is finite; protect it like production data.
Seek a manager who manages: You need air cover, prioritization partnership, and feedback on your leadership, not just your code.
Invest in your energy: Movement, sleep, thinking time. Your brain is your toolchain; treat it like prod.
Find a peer circle: Other leads will save you months of pain by sharing patterns and scripts.

Want to try before you buy into any playbook? Keep a personal “leadership changelog” documenting your decisions and their outcomes. It’s humbling—and priceless.

About the Book: So You Want To Be a Tech Lead by Greg Hatchuk

Greg Hatchuk doesn’t offer a sanitized LinkedIn success story; he walks you through the messy, hilarious, and at times brutal reality of technical leadership. Expect field stories, not fluff. Expect characters who are brilliant and broken at the same time, and systems that look fine on the outside but behave like a zoo behind the glass. It reads like advice scribbled on a bar napkin at 1 a.m.—because that’s often where the best advice lives.

Beyond the tone, the utility is real: patterns for navigating politics without losing integrity, how to tell the truth in rooms that punish it, and why becoming a multiplier is scarier—and better—than staying the fastest coder. If you’ve ever wondered whether everyone else is faking it, this book says the quiet part out loud and hands you a map.

Conclusion: The Job After the Job

Being a tech lead is not about being the smartest person in the room; it’s about building rooms where smart people can do their best work. Your leverage comes from clarity, not heroics; from boring routines, not big speeches; from the courage to choose less, not to promise more. Start small. Protect focus. Write things down. Teach what you learn. And remember: you don’t have to do it alone.

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FAQ

What’s the difference between a Tech Lead and an Engineering Manager?

Titles vary by company. Generally, a Tech Lead owns the technical direction and delivery for a team or area, while an Engineering Manager owns people management (hiring, performance, career growth). In many orgs, a Tech Lead partners with a PM and EM to drive outcomes; in smaller teams, one person wears multiple hats.

Do Tech Leads still write code?

Yes—but less than before, and more strategically. Expect to code on critical paths, prototypes, and high-risk areas, and to jump into incidents. The bigger your team and scope, the more your time shifts to design, reviews, and coordination.

How do I get promoted to Tech Lead?

Start doing parts of the job before you get the title: lead a design, run a retro, mentor a junior engineer, write an RFC that unblocks a project, and present a tradeoff to stakeholders. Document outcomes and feedback. Promotions follow demonstrated impact.

What metrics should Tech Leads track?

Track the four DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change fail rate, MTTR) for delivery health, and pair them with business signals like customer adoption, NPS, or revenue impact. Avoid vanity metrics; pick numbers that drive decisions.

How do I handle conflict with Product or Design?

Name the tradeoff and frame it in outcomes: speed, scope, quality, risk. Propose options with pros and cons, recommend one, and ask for alignment. When emotions spike, reset with shared goals and data. If stalemates persist, escalate early with context, not drama.

What’s the best way to run a blameless postmortem?

Start with a clear timeline, identify contributing factors (not culprits), and extract specific, owner-assigned action items with due dates. Share widely. Reference SRE guidance on postmortem culture for best practices and examples.

How do I prevent burnout as a Tech Lead?

Set communication windows, protect maker time, delegate deliberately, and share the load through incident roles and mentorship. Align your effort with outcomes, not appearances. If you’re consistently working nights and weekends, it’s a system problem—fix that first.

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