Tech Lead Q&A and Videos

I have been wanting improve my technical understanding on what I am working on:

• Since there's so much happening in the backend, frontend and database levels, it can get intimidating to try and see how it all makes sense, when it all feels chaotic trying to put everything together.
• I feel that the one thing that could help me progress to the senior level is to better my technical influence, and I was wondering how I can improve on that.
• I have been proactively speaking with senior engineers and the architect involved with the new feature that's being worked on. That has really helped me better my understanding on what I'm working on. But when it comes to the code, it can be challenging since there are so many files that depend on one another, and I feel that I would need to spend a couple hours a day just understanding how each of those code files work.

What other steps can I take to enhance my technical influence, and then reach that senior level?

Working hard and staying on top of my sprints, I lead a team that focuses on developing tools for customer support to onboard our new features.

Though this work is consistently given priority in team meetings, it is often sidelined or perceived as less critical compared to other product-facing features.

Despite my efforts, I feel I am not acknowledged or seen as impactful and intelligent. I suspect biases at play but cannot substantiate them concretely.

How can I change this perception and ensure that my contributions are recognized and valued within the team?

How can I turn around the situation to be perceived as important and impactful, aligning my hard work with the recognition it deserves?

I am an L5 TL, of a team of less than 10 people. My manager very recently asked me whether I am interested in becoming an EM (managing most if not all of the people on my team).

I like coding and technical contributions, but I believe I like helping people succeed more, including having crucial conversations where things aren't going well. Those things don't come naturally to me, BUT I get great satisfaction out of those tricky situations. I would also like the opportunity to build a team of amazing individuals who come together around a central goal. Based on this I am leaning yes.

However, I know the EM path isn't all roses. What are the top 3 questions I ought to consider, before I decide whether I want to do this?

Hi all, I am going to transfer to Tiktok as a lead MLE next month.

I have 2 months notice period and I was wondering if anyone has any checklists on what I should do during transition so that I can start fresh and ramp up quickly.

I come from FAANG background and going to a startup-ish culture is an exciting but scary prospect for me (especially with the reduced work life balance).

Tips and checklists of links to Taro videos or other resources are welcome. Thank you

I recently became CTO of a small early-stage startup where I'm leading all technical efforts, including by still doing some coding, but am mostly managing other engineers and focusing on the broader technical needs of the company. Previously, I was a technical lead and IC at startups where I had led small teams of other software engineers on product development, but was more in the weeds technically/coding a lot and was not responsible for people management. I'd like to learn about resources I can utilize to further develop my engineering leadership and people management skills.

What resources would you recommend to learn more about the following:

• How to build people management skills as a first time engineering people manager? Are there open source or free trainings or resources that are good for this?
• The latest engineering leadership topics, especially in a startup environment (e.g. how other leaders are tackling common technical and leadership challenges)
• How to meet or connect with other engineering managers/leaders (e.g. startup CTOs, VP of engineering, or technical founders) outside my company to learn from their experiences or share lessons or knowledge with each other

Interested in any types of resources including blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, or virtual or in-person communities or meetups (particularly in NYC) etc. I have some favorite resources so far, but it would be great to learn about what resources others in the Taro community find useful. Thanks!

What’s the best way to handle a situation as a tech lead when you are under pressure to deliver your tasks and ensure that the other team members are also on track? If one developer slacks and doesn’t meet the deadline, is it automatically the lead's fault, especially if the situation was raised well in advance. If the person continues to under deliver with poorly written code, is it okay to spend time and pair program and get work done just to meet deadlines? Keep in mind that the developer is a junior engineer and requires fair bit of hand holding.

I had to approve a PR, although I was not 100% confident, it wasn’t a breaking code and it wouldn’t have caused any backward compatible issues. I received extremely harsh feedback for approving a sub standard from a peer/colleague. Had I not completed the PR, my manager would have provided feedback on the delayed project, what’s the best way to navigate between two leads or managers who are not aligned and expect different outcomes from the same situation?

Please help.

I just joined a brand new team, formed 6 weeks ago. This job is a big step up in responsibility for me, and it's asking me to operate in a manner that I'm unfamiliar with, such as building OKRs and roadmaps for my team - these OKRs and roadmaps will then be used by our cross functional partners. I feel an immense sense of responsibility that I'm not sure I can uphold my end of the bargain, since I feel like I simply there's so much unknown around product requirements and technical constraints. I don't know if I just power through it by working more to discover some of these constraints (which is what I'm mostly trying to do right now).

For the record, my manager says I'm doing great having recently joined the team. However, I constantly feel like I'm behind because I think I should be giving everyone the feeling I've got things under control, but I don't think I'm giving that impression (because that's not true...). How do I deal with this feeling? I feel like I will be feeling this way for some time since I think I have a lot to learn...

Hi! I'm an L5 in a big tech company, tasked with leading a big org-level project that span multiple engineering teams, with lots of cross functional collaboration w/ UX and PM as well.

I'm new to my own team and I'm not the subject matter expert in the area of our work, which is around 8-ish people with about 2 other L5s. In order for me to successfully manage this project for our team, I am already involved in a lot of meetings and I have yet to set up recurring 1:1s. I believe I should set up some more of these 1:1s, but I can't imagine I would be setting one up w/ everyone I come across.

Which 1-on-1s / relationship should I prioritize, how frequently should they happen, and how do I ensure these meetings are good use of both my time and the other person's time?

I work in as an iOS engineer. My current company is a startup that's scaling up fast. In classic startup fashion, testing was historically not a top priority here. As a consequence, we struggle with lots of manual QAing and low code confidence when modifying pieces of poorly tested legacy code.

This has improved in the past year simply by unit testing every new piece of code by default and by introducing unit tests in legacy code as we touch it, boy scouting style.

At this point, I think we need to step it up and I'm looking forward to formalising a testing strategy for our mobile team.

Here are some ideas I have:

• In the realm of unit tests:
  • I want to introduce API contract tests because our back-end API lacks documentation. In these tests we'd unit test the way we build our requests to API endpoints, and we'd have a sample JSON response from the server to test that the app can parse it into our data models as expected.
  • I want to introduce localisation tests because our app supports many languages but we are always manually testing localisation. In these tests, we'd assert that the outputs of our formatting logic are the ones we want for different locales.
• In the realm of user interface tests:
  • I want to introduce snapshot testing, because right now the only way we can test that our views are rendered as expected for different view configurations (for example RTL vs LTR, empty content, loading content, content in verbose languages, etc.) is manually.
  • I want to introduce UI tests (sparingly, only for key flows) because we have no e2e tests. Currently, key flows are tested manually and frequently to prevent regressions, which takes lots of time.

What other testing strategies can I propose to establish some standard we can use to further improve our code confidence, reduce bugs, and rely more on automated testing?

How do the top tier tech companies approach mobile testing?

Some engineers like to code, some like to manage projects, some like to stay close to the users. Software Engineers come in all shapes and sizes.

What are the major archetypes of Software Engineers and how can one identify one's own archetype to double down and improve.

Context:

(1) My team owns a service for which we're rolling out a new version with a big revamp of all the public interfaces and a ton of breaking changes.

(2) This is a legacy system that is being refactored to resolve some severe issues that its consumer systems have been complaining about for a long time.

(3) This service has many consumers in our org across multiple teams that depend on it for a lot of critical functionality.

(4) We need to migrate all consumers to the new service. My team cannot parallely support both the versions and the legacy system has to be deprecated before the new service deployment.

Challenges:

(1) Originally, the plan was for my team to roll out the new service and migrate all of the consumers to the new service as well.

(2) Now, we've had a huge scope expansion in the refactoring itself due to which the project timeline has extended massively.

(3) My team feels that working on such a long timeline project is risky and prone to further scope expansion if new consumers start using the old legacy system in the meanwhile.

(4) Another challenge with this is that my team has no context or understanding of all the consumer systems.

Questions:

(1) What approach can I use to now change the plan and convince the managers/tech leads of the consumer teams to own the migration of their consumers code to the new service?

(2) In general, what approach would be ideal for such a large-scale migration - Centralized migration by the service provider team vs distributed migration by all the respective consumer teams?

I've seen advices here in Taro that seniors should make themselves very much replaceable so that when this senior is away, someone is able to cover for them and the team could do well, which makes sense.

I thought the fact that people found the advice to be helpful, shows that making yourself replaceable isn't something that's very intuitive the first time. Like if someone didn't read the advice, they probably wouldn't have optimized for that.

I'm not quite senior yet but just curious to understand the situation (and people) better - was this thinking assumes that the amount of scope is in hyper-growth phase? Are there cases where it isn't really applicable / optimal for them to do so (and so they don't make themselves replaceable, and still do well) - then wouldn't they just continue doing it and we can't really blame them? I feel it's rare that people would change their behavior unless they really understand why.

I recently completed a project where I was the sole IC on the project. The project mainly involved migrating logic from a legacy service but involved integrating with a service managed by another team. I was responsible for the design of solution, estimating a timeline and delivery of the project (writing the code and testing).

Unfortunately, I ran into errors last minute and had to communicate delays a day before the expected completion date. We also ran into a tricky error post launch but I failed to communicate an expected deadline after the cause of the bug was identified. My manager and I have spoken on potential strategies and the need to communicate expected completion time.

My question here: What can I do a better in the future? When driving a project, how are you structuring your work so errors are surfaced as early as possible? How are you communicating risks and concerns that come up during a project?

What should I think about and focus my efforts on when I get a project and a role that's of (1) bigger scope and (2) tighter deadlines than I'm used to?

Context

A reorg has suddenly thrust me into the TL role for a very high-profile project on a new team. This project is part of OKRs 4 levels up the chain and has the eyes of several director level people across different functions. From what I've heard, this project already suffered from "too many cooks in the kitchen" syndrome, and on top of that, this project has delivery date set in Q3, which is quite aggressive from our org's standards.

I've landed in this position because I was transitioning to this team prior to the reorg, AND the EM/TL/PM/2 L5s has been reorg'ed out, and they needed someone who had previously TL experience and was willing to do it.

I've previously TL'ed a team of 4 people, with important but "normal" priority projects. This is clearly a great opportunity for me, but I am afraid I'm not ready to handle it and I'm at a bit of loss as to what I should be focusing most of my effort on. With the tight deadlines I have, I feel like every day will be a battle so any advice on how to approach this will be appreciated.

I have one other L5 supporting me who I trust very much and a new EM who's rumored to be very good. We currently have 4 SWE including me and we'll be getting more at least 4 more engineers, with lots of adjacent teams helping out. I do also have good standing and connection in the org overall and I know how to get a "normal" project in our org over the line (I did an in-org transfer).

What I'm thinking about right now

1. Knowledge Transition: since a lot of critical members of the team are leaving and I am taking over, I feel the biggest priority in the near term is to absorb as much knowledge from them as possible. So far, they have some prototypes, and I wanted to get my hands dirty, so maybe I should focus on is to understand the work that's been done really well, and the design choices that's been made already?
2. Gather support: I feel like biggest personal risk is that I don't know how to show up in higher-stake meetings with directors. Is it any different? Where do you all see the risk is?
3. Enable the team: I know the biggest responsibility I have, more than anything, is to make sure the team is able to work on the project and help us deliver this. Aside from the L5, I don't know a lot about the people. I feel I should putting my focus on ensuring they are as successful as possible, not focusing on my own technical knowledge as much, for us to succeed. Is that a good way to think about it?
4. Self-management: I anticipate I'll be very stressed and pulled in many directions. I already feel this way. What are some tools I can leverage in "crunch time"?

A teammate of mine has sometimes delayed tasks and informed about them at the last minute leading to us missing the delivery deadlines. As the tech lead, I've shared this feedback along with explaining the impact and suggestions to tackle the issue. I've encountered this situation a few times even after sharing this feedback.

What other steps can I take to help the teammate and minimise the overall impact on our delivery?

Context:

• I'm working on a project that is known and understood to be at risk by most tech and other XFN stakeholders. This project has been attempted a few times in the past but didn't succeed and is being retried.
• There are a few upcoming features having tech dependencies on the delivery of this project but I feel that the stakeholders aren't confident about the success of the project.
• The project might need some support in the form of reviews, brainstorming and stewardship from the stakeholders to succeed.
• As the tech lead, I want to create and maintain stakeholders' confidence in the project so that they're enthusiastic to provide us the support we need.

Questions:

1. What can I do to understand current expectations of the stakeholders better?
2. What communication (or other) steps can I take to create and maintain stakeholders' confidence in the success of the project?
3. Apart from generating confidence, is there anything else that I could be doing to ensure stakeholders' support?

Context:-

1. My team is going to work on a new project which involves upgrading a service and migrating/enabling all of the dependents to use the new service.
2. This service provides a business critical functionality for our teams and the new version attempts to solve a lot of high impact pain points with the previous version.
3. We have just inherited this service and none of us have worked with it or any of its dependents before. We have some support from the previous team that worked on this project but only in a consultation capacity.
4. This is a project that has been attempted multiple times by various teams over the years - unsuccessfully or with little progress. My perception is that it's going to be a difficult project with low-moderate chances of success.
5. There is a lot documentation but most of it is somewhat outdated. There are a lot of PRs as well but these are for the unsuccessful attempts so I'm not sure how impactful it would be to go through them.
6. The plans for the previous attempts only had internal milestones for the team and a single big-bang completion milestone for stakeholders.

Questions:-

1. How can I identify smaller, independent high-level milestones that are relevant for external stakeholders?
2. How can I come up with broad estimates and capacity requirements for the external and internal milestones if I'm not clear on what these milestones would require for completion?
3. How can I think about de-risking this attempt of the project and improving the probability of success?

What is the role of Staff Engineer at a early stage startup where infrastructure is on an average setup? In terms mobile application it is standard app with migration scope to react native but there are no takers for migration at all (only product release need)

Here how can staff engineer play a role and how to deliver product and engineering goals with awareness to large eng teams?

I work as a mid-level software engineer. We have team channels where people can reach us on. But for some reason people always message me in a private message or they visit my office for team related tasks or product owner tasks. I keep telling them to ask the person in charge or communicate through our team channel, but they don't.

I don't want to be rude to them, yet I find my frustration growing. Sometimes I feel like they can't bother to formalise their requests, so they go to me to quickly mention whatever is bothering them, so they later can refer to our "discussion" if the issue is brought up again.

What should I do?

I would like to understand how can I drive an effective Tech discovery session (just had a PRD walkthrough) with the team (remotely working) before we start writing a detailed system design document. The engineers are mostly L4 and are still learning how to effectively collaborate instead of full blown meeting.

I'm a tech lead on a long-running project that has gathered momentum over the last couple of months after being in a slow death phase for a many months. Recently, a couple of senior engineers joined the team and we've gotten rid of a lot of things that were slowing down the project. We've managed to hit many awesome milestones on time as a consequence.

The project is nearing it's endgame phase but we've unfortunately hit a snag in this last leg due to which it seems that we'll be missing the last couple of deadlines by a decent margin. Due to the expectations that we've set by consistently delivering on time for all the previous milestones, our manager has suggested "pushing" to meet the last couple of deadlines.

I don't want to ask my team to work overtime or on the weekend to meet these deadlines (especially since we've been doing a great job of turning the project around and delivering on time). How can I push back against it in a manner that does not impact my currently ongoing or future performance reviews?