Why we need EMs and tech leads (No. 59)
In this letter, I give you my own management 101 for context on why we need EMs and tech leads
Hey tech leads,
My goal this week is to help clarify misunderstandings about the tech lead role by thinking more about the context of the role.
Context is key
If you Google for the tech lead role, you’ll get lots of ideas about what tech leads are supposed to do. Mentoring is often a central theme. Defining architectures is another. Creating a safe environment for the team is yet another. There are dozens or hundreds of ideas about what you’re supposed to be doing.
Most of these articles lack context. The tech lead role, if it even exists, at a tiny, software-based startup like Substack (only six people according to LinkedIn), is going to be very different from a tech lead in the IT department of a big pharmaceutical company. Depending on the experience, a tech lead who publishes an article on the tech lead role on Medium or dev.to is obviously going to be skewed by their experience.
I’m certainly not going to definitively state what a tech lead is or isn’t in this letter.
However, what we can do is step back and think about why managers or leads exist at all within companies. Even though the specific activities of leads or managers vary, their general purpose is almost always the same. We’ll start with the need for managers, which will help explain why managers need support for tech leads.
Why do we need managers?
You might be able to imagine a world where a company operates in an idealized, fully decentralized way. In this vision, individuals might unite around a common vision and self-organize to get stuff done. Maybe this organization would work like a democracy, a meritocracy, or even a bunch of decentralized nodes reaching consensus over some agreed-on protocol or algorithm.
The reality is however, for most organizations, that they need to organize themselves into some kind of hierarchy. You might be interested to know that a big part of the need has less to do with human nature and more to do with the idea that investors and shareholders really need to know who’s in charge.
What do managers do?
Day to day, managers in all businesses do a lot of different things. But I think you’d be safe to generalize their work into the three general activities that I mentioned on Sunday.
Managers need to:
understand what’s happening in the market by trying to see into the future,
make decisions and goals about what where to go and what to do both today and in the future,
and, finally, obtain and deploy resources—technological, physical, time, and human (even though I hate that term)—to accomplish the goals and decisions
The decisions and the process are the same no matter where you are. The only difference is the scale of the decisions. For example, the CEO needs to formulate a compelling and correct view of the future of his or her industry. Then the CEO needs to work with the board to make massive scale decisions related what direction to go and how to get there. Finally, the CEO needs to deploy resources to, say, buying businesses, hiring in certain areas, laying off in others, and so on.
As you move down the organizational chart, the SVPs, VPs, Senior Directors, Directors, and Senior Managers are all charged with finer and finer grained cycles. For example, Directors often need to understand their group’s opportunities in the organization, make strategic decisions where their group should go to capitalize on them, and secure funding and execute on hiring to accomplish the goals.
How does this apply to EMs?
When we get down to the EM level, the three cycles are indeed quite a bit more narrow.
First, engineering managers need to have a clear view into where their broader group is going. For example, when an EM manages one set of enterprise applications supporting a company’s business group, the EM needs a clear view of where the IT group is going and what the business will need over the next few years. The EM should also have a clear view of where the organization’s technology stack is going.
Then the EM needs to make decisions and set goals about how the application needs to evolve to meet changing business and technology needs. Usually EMs will include a lot of people in these decisions or delegate them to tech leads (more on this in a second), but ultimately the EM has to make key decisions—both short- and long-term.
Finally, the EM needs to obtain and deploy resources. For example, the EM may need to advocate for more headcount to accomplish the EM’s goals. Or, the EM may need to ask for budget to purchase software, EC2 instances, or even consulting or training for the existing team.
Once the resources are obtained, the EM needs to make sure all the resources are aligned in the right way. Are the right people working on the right things? Is the team using the technology the right way? Is the team (or teams) building the right things?
Where does the tech lead fit in?
The tech lead is usually a delegate from the EM (or whatever title it is in your organization) to any or all of the kinds of tasks just mentioned. In some cases, the EM has too many projects and people to keep track of everything. In other cases, the EM is stronger or weaker in any of the areas mentioned above and may delegate to a tech lead.
The engineering manager may not be able to keep track of where a technology is going, either because the EM is too busy or just doesn’t know the stack very well and may turn to a tech lead for guidance on how the technology is evolving. For example, imagine a situation where an EM started out by leading a Node team, but as time has gone on the EM now manages a Rust team as well. The EM may nominate someone from the Rust team to help him or her understand where Rust is going as a technology.
Similarly, the EM may have struggle to independently make certain decisions about how to make changes in the application, architecture, or the team. This could be because the EM manages too many people or projects to feel confident to make decisions without insight from a tech lead who he or she designated to stay closer to the team or project. Tech leads may provide insight or even make decisions on their behalf.
Finally, EMs very often turn to tech leads to make sure that resources are deployed correctly. They need to know that the right people (I really hate to call them human “resources,” but you get the point, “talent” is cooler) are working on the right things. They need to know that, if there are small blockers, confusions, or weaknesses on the team that someone, a tech lead, is there to resolve them quickly. They often need a singular person to stay close to both the code and the team to help them scale.
Because EMs tend to use tech leads in different ways and because there are so many different types of industries, maybe now you can see why there is so much confusion and lack of clarity about what tech leads do.
This is by no means conclusive or exhaustive, but I think it will help you understand why tech leads exist.
So there you go—have a great Monday tech leads!
-michael
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