The Startup Tech Lead

Hello world!

If you are a Tech Lead in a startup, then you enjoy and are expected to not only contribute as an individual contributor but also manage a small team of engineers. If you don’t already, you may be expected to do it at some point. I like to use the term TLM, Tech Lead Manager to describe the role of Tech Leads in startups. I want to start talking about life as a tech lead because I have been living it for the last decade or so. It is a stepping stone to becoming an EM in the big tech companies but in a startup it is the stone that senior engineers are expected to balance on for several years until the startup needs and can afford managers who are not hands-on. 

I have been a TLM in seed, early and late stage startups. I have known for a long time that I like to build in, with and for startups. However, I did not plan at any point to be a TLM.

• When I started Lucid Tech and was building with four part time or full time engineers, I was a TLM.
• When I was asked to manage the engineering team at HyperTrack I was a TLM.
• As I built insight-mining data analytics software at ThoughtSpot , a pre-IPO startup, I also found myself building teams.
• And now, when my title reads EM, I am still a TLM because it is far too early to not be hands-on.

If you enjoy building engineering systems and organizations then you are/have been a TLM. 

How have I been playing this role for so many years even though I never planned to? Because startups have a way of getting its missionaries to do whatever is needed of them and I am an eager missionary. And because I like to wear different hats. A cookie-cutter engineering graduate millennial has a comfortable list of usual-suspect career choices - investment banking, management consulting, and big tech. I had the privilege of trying my hands at all of them early on in my life.

The challenge with the role of a Tech Lead Manager is that it’s a fairly new role. And it’s not an often talked-about role. Both of its origin roles - Software Engineer and Engineering Manager are fairly young in age. Software engineering has been around only since Linus Torvalds wrote Unix about 30 years ago. In the last decade or so as big tech took shape, engineering management has become a separate career track. Don’t get me wrong - engineering management has been a discipline for long, what it means for the domain of software engineering is still being defined. In the early 20th Century, engineering management for car manufacturing was being figured out. In the late 20th Century engineering managers for chip manufacturing wished there was more literature or training they could learn from. I feel the same today.

So I have decided to start sharing what I am learning, what I have learned, the mistakes that I have made, the resources I have found helpful, the advice I have got from mentors and so on, in the hope that it helps engineers who are passionate about building technology and organizations. I hope it can start some conversations from which I am sure to learn myself. I hope to publish something every week...

Edit: Part 1 on Roles and Resources is out!