Becoming a Tech Lead: From Tech to People

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm going to talk about the transition of becoming a tech lead, the skills that you need to go through this transition and the key mindset that you're going to have to go through in this process. But before, I want to start with a quick intro. So, I'm Annamarie Fischer. I've been in tech for more than 10 years now. I started as a developer. Then I moved into leadership. I became a tech lead, a product director. But my main focus for the past four years has been supporting techies in their journey into transitioning into leadership positions by developing their soft skills.

And so, I've been a career coach and a tech lead trainer. I've trained over 300 tech leads in these past years and worked with over 500 techies at different levels in their careers. And I'm very passionate about the tech leadership aspect, specifically the people side of it. And that's why I'm here today. I use every tool that I have at my disposal to talk about the topic on my LinkedIn, on my newsletter, on the O'Reilly platform and on events like this. I'm very grateful to be here today and share my thoughts on the tech lead role with you.

With that in mind, let's jump right into the definition of the role. So, this is my definition that the tech lead is a software engineer responsible for leading a development team and accountable for the technical deliverables of that team. The reason that I'm saying it's important to mention that it's my definition is because the industry, the tech industry doesn't seem to have an agreement on what exactly the tech lead role is, which makes it so complex. So, this definition comes from my experience as a tech lead working with so many other tech leads and from different companies, from different cultures, from different environments.

So, this is kind of the part that I've seen is matching for all of these different perspectives on what the tech lead is. And they all seem to agree that, okay, you are responsible for leading a development team, and you are definitely accountable for whatever that team is delivering. And so, this is the reason why this role is so complicated. And it just adds up to the complexity of being usually the first time the people like techies jump into a leadership role. And there are not a lot of resources out there on the role. Actually, when I started, I struggled to find specific resources on the role. That's why I teamed up with O'Reilly to write the book for tech leads that supposedly, and hopefully, it's going to give you the guiding tools to go and transition through these roles. It's for starting tech leads, but also for tech leads that have been doing this for a while, and they can learn new ways to approach different challenges in the role. So, if you're interested, take a look. It's already in early release version and it's going to come out at the end of the year.

So, the first assumption people have when it comes to the tech lead role, is that the tech lead is the most technical person in the team. When I started as a tech lead, and when I started as a dev, I definitely believed so. But when I started training for the role, I got some professional training, and I started practicing some of the leadership responsibilities, I got the feeling that I might be wrong and that this assumption was wrong. When I jumped into the role, I was sure I was wrong.

So, the tech lead can be the most technical person in the team, but it definitely doesn't have to be the most technical person in the team. Actually, in my experience working with tech leads on the daily basis, I see tech leads that are very technical, struggling more to do the transition than the ones that have been also investing in their people skills. Because the situation that you encounter on the daily basis as a tech lead, they don't necessarily require tech skills and they cannot be solved with tech skills.

Every time I saw two developers fighting for hours on what JSON parsing library to use, it wasn't about the JSON parsing library. It was usually because they had like an underlying conflict between them and they couldn't agree on pretty much anything. So, all of these situations that I've experienced as a tech lead in Totoro and that I see tech leads experience every single day keep leading me to the same conclusion, and that is that most tech problems are people problems.

It was usually because they didn't have a clear process on who's owning this and how to move it forward and how to integrate it in the daily work. Or the tech lead was missing the delegation tools to be able to give this task away to another senior in the team that can move it forward and if they didn't have the time to deal with it, it would just get basically left out. Or every time I saw a tech team that could not agree on a technical decision, it wasn't because the decision wasn't good enough or really well documented. It was usually because the team didn't have like a clear decision-making process.

So, they were going in circles discussing the same things, the same worries, without anyone being able to jump in and move the team forward. So, all of these situations that I've experienced as a tech lead in Totoro and that I see tech leads experience every single day keep leading me to the same conclusion, and that is that most tech problems are people problems.

So, in order for you as a tech lead to deal with these people problems, you don't necessarily need more tech skills as you need more soft skills or people skills, which leads me to the seven essential soft skills that you need to develop in order to be successful as a tech lead. The first one is listening. Everything starts with listening. There is a lot of hearing these days and we feel like we're listening, but actually there's a lot of noise around us. Listening, like the listening that I'm referring to, the active listening, it's about being there completely for the other person without judging, without just waiting for your spot in the conversation to jump in.

So, it's a different type of listening, but once you start developing this, you're gonna get better also at the next skill, which is building relationships, which it's one of the first things that I recommend people to do when they jump into the role, to start building relationships not just with their team members, but also their stakeholders, their other teams around them, other tech leads. This is gonna help you greatly in whatever it is that you are building and it's gonna set you up for success in the role. So, it's definitely something to put effort into.

The next skills are in the growing people space. So, we're talking about coaching, mentoring, delegation, feedback. They are all gonna help you help your team grow continuously and of course, by your team continuously growing, they will deliver better results, which are going to reflect on you as a tech lead, because the results of your team are going to be your results. And last but not least, they are the skills that are going to help you align your team and your stakeholders and all the people involved on a certain strategy, on a common goal. And for this, you're going to require the skill of facilitation to be able to help the team and a group of people to get to an agreement and conflict resolution to navigate whatever conflict that's gonna pop out. And if you have a healthy team, you definitely are gonna have conflict. You just have to learn how to make it efficient and useful for your team.

So, these are the seven skills that, soft skills, that you will need to develop as a tech lead. But they are also, they are also like complicated to develop, I know. And we don't have time today to go through all of them one by one. But I created this course on the O'Reilly platform, which is called soft skills for tech leads, that actually goes to each and one of these skills. It gives you practical strategies that you can apply tomorrow in your day-to-day role to start developing these skills. It also goes through the general process of developing your soft skills, which relies on intentional learning, which speeds up the learning process 10x. If you want to take a look, you can find it on the O'Reilly platform.

Next, now that we look at the soft skills that you need to develop, we're gonna look at the mindset shifts that you're gonna have to go through in order to start figuring out these roles. And you're gonna go through these mindset shifts at your own pace. They're just gonna happen by you developing those skills and by applying some behavior changes.

The first mindset shift is going from the individual mindset to the team mindset, from 'I' to 'we.' It's about enabling someone else in your team to take over tasks and thinking about multiplication of effect within the team. The next shift involves transitioning from a coding-focused mindset to value-driven decisions, emphasizing the importance of providing value and engaging stakeholders for clarity. Lastly, shifting from short-term to long-term thinking, focusing on team direction and enabling execution for long-term goals.

It's about your team, your success. It's tightly related to the success of your team. So, whatever it is that you're doing doesn't matter as much if your team doesn't agree with it or doesn't align with it. And so, it's very important that you start thinking in matters of, I'll handle this to matter of, okay, how can I enable someone else in my team to take over this task or move this forward? Think about it like if you, as a senior, you have to help someone in your team grow their technical skills. You would normally have some pairing session, give them some resources, you'll be very involved in the process. Well, as a tech lead, you will not have the time and the resources to be doing this with each person in your team.

So, a great way for you to support the growth of this particular person without you being there is just to pair them up with another senior, that they can help them and do the pairing and the support themselves without you having to be there. So, this is a way too for you to still fulfill your expectation to grow people without you having to be there. So, you have to start thinking about, okay, how can I make things happen without me actually being there? That's how you build the factor of multiplying your effect in a team.

The next mindset shift is about going from the coding-focused, centric-focused mindset to the value decision, value-driven decisions. So, going from just coding to providing value. You cannot afford to just jump into coding anymore and you cannot afford to let your team directly jump into developing code. You have to start thinking about what is the value we're providing, and that value looks very different to different people. So, you need to have constant conversations with your stakeholders, with your customers, with your users to make sure that that value is being provided by your team.

You might have to ask more why questions, why are we building this and how can we deliver more value. Sometimes it's not even about the coding. I've been in multiple situations where the best way to solve a problem to deliver value didn't even involve code, and that's actually where the beauty of focusing on value happens. And you're going to have to start focusing on this if you want to get those results as a tech lead. And last but not least is going from the short-term thinking to the long-term thinking. So, it's not about anymore as an individual contributor, you're thinking about, okay, I'm just going to finish this task.

You're kind of going task by task, right? As a tech lead, you have to see the bigger picture and you have to think about the long-term. What is your team going to work on for the long-term? The first thing that a team needs in order to be effective is a clear direction. They need a clear perspective on where is it that they're going and how they're going to get there, and it's your role to provide that in order for them to be able to focus on execution. So, you have to start maybe coding less so others can code more. You're going to have to do less coding and less of the activities that you've been doing before in order to be able to focus on planning, and that's okay. That just comes with the role.

There are different times when you're more involved in one or the other, but just to kind of set the expectations right, this is going to happen. So, these are the mindset shifts from I to we, from coding to value, and from short-term to long-term planning. If there's one thing that I want you to take out of this session is that tech leadership is more about people than tech. Every techie that is going through, that is jumping into a leadership role gets to this conclusion sooner or later. There is no way around it, so you will have to invest into your soft skills and to your mindset shifts in order to be successful as a tech lead, but it can definitely be done. I see people doing it every day, so you just have to keep at it, and there are ways to do that easily.

With that in mind, thank you so much for joining today. If you have any questions, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm more than happy to answer any questions you might have. Thank you.