Welcome

Introduction

As the name implies, this handbook gives practical advice and guidance for Tech Leads. But it also aims to be useful for Senior Engineers, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Architects, Testers, and others.

What is a Tech Lead?

Many organisations have a role called Tech Lead, but the specifics vary widely.

Scale. Tech Leads usually lead a single team, but this is not always the case. They may lead a small team of two or three, a larger team of ten or so, or even several teams that may comprise twenty or so people in total.

Coding. Tech Leads are always expected to remain in and around the code, but in some teams and organisations they remain significant individual contributors while in others this mostly takes the form of mentoring, pairing and reviewing code.

Architecture. Tech Leads always contribute to defining the system architecture, but the extent of their involvement varies widely depending on the organisation. One key influence is whether there is a separate Architect role and if so how that operates.

Testing. Tech Leads are ultimately responsible for ensuring appropriate testing is done. They may work with dedicated tester(s), Software Engineers in Test, or similar, who can advise on specifics, but if not then they need to fill that gap.

System reliability. The Tech Lead ensures the system is reliable. That is, that non-functional requirements are understood, met, and validated through appropriate testing. This includes building in observability, security, performance, scalability and resilience. Depending on the organisation they may have more or less support from existing tooling, patterns and specialist roles such as Platform or SRE teams.

Culture. Tech Leads always play a role in nurturing and shaping the culture in the teams they lead, and in some cases they are the the primary person doing this, while in others there may be significant contributions from a Scrum Master, Delivery Lead or Product Owner.

People management. In some organisations, Tech Leads do not have formal people management responsibility, while in others they do. Either way, a familiarity and confidence with people leadership is necessary to be effective in the role.

Process. Tech Leads always take the lead on defining and evolving some aspects of the team ways of working. In some cases, this may be limited to the more technical aspects such as branching and code review policies, while in others they may also lead the agile and people management aspects.

Work in progress

By design, this handbook is a work in progress, and will be extended, updated and improved over time.

Contribute

If you have experiences to share, or if you find something confusing, wrong or incomplete, then please get in touch ↗.