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f you stick around a team long enough, you start to become the person who knows a lot about a technical stack. As many of us have learned, sometimes “knows a lot” is code for “the last person who touched this repository”. It can be overwhelming to be in the position at first as you begin to balance answering questions from junior engineers with actually getting your own work done. Then, one day, you wake up and you’re a technical lead. Congratulations! But what does it mean? How do you go from just being the person who “knows a lot” to the person who is guiding the technical development of a project for several engineers?

The first step is trusting your team to get work done. You may think that you could do it faster yourself and you are probably right—after all, that’s why they made you the technical lead. But this is not technical lead thinking. Someday the engineers on your team can develop into your own present level of effectiveness, and it is your job to help get them there. This frees you to start thinking at a higher level of abstraction: you can analyze the system as a whole. But how do you help those engineers you lead develop? That is what I hope to cover and help with below.