What Is a Technical Lead? More Than Just the Best Coder on the Team
There's a common misconception about technical leads. The misconception is that a technical lead is the best coder on the team, promoted to a leadership role. This is wrong. A technical lead is a different job entirely.
A technical lead is 40% technical decisions and 60% communication, context-sharing, and unblocking. The job isn't to write the best code. It's to make sure the whole team codes well.
If you're evaluating whether to become a technical lead, or you're leading engineers and want to understand the role better, here's what the job actually is.
What Is a Technical Lead?
A technical lead is responsible for the technical direction of a team or project. They're the person who decides what architecture decisions get made, who ensures code quality stays high, who mentors less experienced engineers, and who unblocks the team when they get stuck.
In contrast, a senior engineer is typically an individual contributor. They write code, they may mentor others, but they're not responsible for team technical strategy. A senior engineer's scope is usually one or two major areas of the system. A technical lead's scope is the whole team's output.
An engineering manager is responsible for the people - hiring, feedback, career development, performance reviews. A technical lead is responsible for the technology. In some organizations, one person is both. In larger organizations, they're different roles.
The technical lead doesn't have to be the best coder on the team. They should be very good, but their value comes from making the team good, not being individually brilliant.
Technical Lead Responsibilities
A technical lead has concrete, measurable responsibilities.
System design decisions. When the team is deciding whether to refactor a module, build a new service, or stick with the existing system, the tech lead owns that decision. They gather input from the team. They consider the tradeoffs. They decide.
Code review standards. What does good code look like? What patterns do we follow? What do we avoid? The tech lead defines this. They enforce it through code review. They coach people on how to write better code.
Architecture health. Is the system becoming more complex or staying stable? Are dependencies proliferating or being managed? Is the team able to add features at the same speed as six months ago? The tech lead measures this and takes action if things are degrading.
Unblocking the team. Someone is stuck. They don't understand how something works. The code is too tangled to add the feature they need. The tech lead helps. They find the context the person is missing or decide that refactoring is necessary.
Technical mentorship. Junior engineers don't know how to approach problems. The tech lead teaches them. They don't just answer questions. They help people learn to think like engineers.
Risk assessment. New dependency? That's a risk. Technology decision that's hard to undo? That's a risk. The tech lead thinks about long-term consequences, not just shipping the next feature.
Scalability planning. As the team grows or the system grows, will the current architecture support it? The tech lead thinks ahead.
Skills a Technical Lead Needs
Being a good technical lead requires a specific skill set. Deep coding ability is only part of it.
System thinking. Seeing how parts fit together. Understanding that optimizing one function while making another ten times slower is a bad tradeoff. Thinking about consequences across the whole system.
Communication. Writing clear design documents. Explaining complex decisions so the whole team understands the why. Listening to people's concerns and addressing them. A tech lead spends a lot of time writing and talking.
Context building. Knowing what the business is trying to do. Understanding constraints. Understanding what matters to customers. A tech lead translates between business and engineering.
Judgment. Knowing when to enforce a standard and when to make an exception. Knowing when to refactor and when to ship as-is. Knowing when to go deep on a technical problem and when to delegate.
Humility. Knowing that you don't know everything. Being willing to learn from people with less experience. Changing your mind when presented with better information.
Technical depth. Understanding the systems you're responsible for at a deep level. Not necessarily being the expert in every single area, but being able to read code, understand databases, understand networks, understand deployment.
Technical Lead vs Engineering Manager
These roles are often confused. They require different skills and have different responsibilities.
A technical lead is responsible for the quality of the code and the architecture. An engineering manager is responsible for the people, the team's delivery, and career development.
A technical lead might decide not to refactor something because it would slip a deadline. An engineering manager might push for the refactor anyway because it's a good learning opportunity for the junior engineer who would do it.
A tech lead might say we should use technology X because it scales better. An engineering manager might push back because our team knows technology Y better and we'd ship faster with it.
In some organizations, one person is both. When this works, it's usually because the person is very good and the team is small. When teams get large, they split. And that's fine. Both roles are valuable.
The Codebase Problem: You Can't Lead What You Don't Understand
Here's the core constraint on the technical lead role: you can't make good technical decisions without understanding your codebase.
If you don't know how your system is structured, you can't judge whether a proposal is good. If you don't know what code is brittle and what code is stable, you can't assess risk. If you don't know which parts of the system are changing frequently and which are stable, you can't identify what to invest in.
This is why visibility is the biggest challenge for technical leads. In a small team with a simple system, you can keep the whole system in your head. In a large team with a complex system, you can't.
Most technical leads don't have good visibility into their codebase. They know the parts they work on. They know the architecture at a high level. But they don't have a clear picture of how everything connects, what the complexity distribution is, where the bottlenecks are.
This is a real problem. Without good visibility, technical lead decisions become slower and often wrong. A tech lead might approve an architecture that introduces circular dependencies because they didn't see the dependencies. They might decide something is low-risk because they didn't realize three other services depend on it.
Common Technical Lead Mistakes
Experienced tech leads avoid the same traps over and over.
Not getting feedback from the team. A tech lead makes a decision, but doesn't listen to people who have concerns. This builds resentment and misses important context.
Changing decisions too often. Tech leads need to be decisive. But constantly reversing decisions makes the team confused about what they're doing.
Not giving people autonomy. Micromanaging every decision slows everything down and prevents people from learning.
Not spending enough time on code. A tech lead who stops coding entirely loses understanding of what the team faces. You need to stay current.
Making architecture decisions without team input. The team knows things you don't. Their input makes decisions better.
Not measuring the impact of decisions. You make an architecture change. It's supposed to make things faster. Did it? You can't know if you didn't measure.
How to Become a Technical Lead
Becoming a technical lead is a progression. You don't just switch jobs.
Start by having stronger opinions about technical decisions. In code review, start explaining why you'd do something differently. Share design thoughts with your team. Be the person who thinks about tradeoffs.
Take on responsibility for specific systems. Instead of contributing everywhere, own one area. Make it the best-designed, best-tested, cleanest code in the company. Show what good looks like.
Mentor people. Help junior engineers. Do code reviews with detailed feedback. Help people think through problems.
Document your thinking. Write design documents. Write architecture notes. Show that you think systematically about problems.
Ask for the role. Most teams won't automatically create a tech lead position. You might need to make the case that the team needs one and that you're the right person for it.
FAQ
Can you be a technical lead part-time while still coding heavily?
Yes, but it's hard. You need time for code review, mentoring, and thinking about architecture. Some tech leads do 50% coding and 50% leadership work. 70% coding, 30% leadership usually doesn't work well.
What happens to your coding skills when you're a technical lead?
They atrophy if you're not careful. The best tech leads stay current by coding regularly, even if not as much as before.
Should a technical lead make all the architectural decisions?
No. Big decisions should involve the team. The tech lead's role is to facilitate the decision, gather input, think about tradeoffs, and decide when consensus isn't reachable.
Is technical lead the same as staff engineer?
Not always. A staff engineer is typically an individual contributor with deep expertise. A technical lead leads a team. Some organizations have both roles. Some use them interchangeably.
How do you measure if a technical lead is doing a good job?
Look for team velocity staying steady or increasing, code quality staying high or improving, and people feeling like they understand the system and their role in it. Look for the team being unblocked and making good technical decisions.