Technical Leadership
A comprehensive guide to technical leadership. Covers core responsibilities, essential skills, time management, team dynamics, and common challenges.
A Technical Lead provides both technical direction and leadership to a development team. Drawing from my experience leading a team of engineers at Fygurs, this guide covers core responsibilities, essential skills, team dynamics, and lessons learned from the transition from individual contributor to technical leader.
What is a Technical Lead?
A Technical Lead bridges the gap between hands-on engineering and leadership. Unlike pure managers who focus on people and processes, or developers who focus solely on code, Tech Leads balance both-setting technical direction while remaining active contributors.
When I transitioned from Software Engineer to Technical Lead at Fygurs, the biggest shift wasn't technical-it was mindset. I went from being responsible for my own code to being responsible for the entire team's output, architecture decisions, and delivery timelines.
Key Characteristics
- Hands-on: Still writes code (30-50% of time)
- Not a manager: No HR authority or direct reports
- Influential: Leads through expertise, not authority
- Team-level architect: Represents System Architect at team level
Core Responsibilities
TECH LEAD RESPONSIBILITIES ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────┐ │ │ │ Architecture│ │ Mentoring │ │Communication│ │ │ │ & Technical │ │ & Team │ │ & Stakeholder│ │ │ │ Direction │ │ Development │ │ Management │ │ │ └──────┬──────┘ └──────┬──────┘ └──────┬──────┘ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ▼ ▼ ▼ │ │ ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │ Code Quality & Reviews │ │ │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │ │ │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Architecture & Technical Direction
Tech Leads own the technical vision for their team's domain. They make architectural decisions, evaluate trade-offs, and ensure long-term maintainability.
At Fygurs, I designed our microservices architecture using a Turborepo monorepo with NestJS, Django, and Next.js services communicating via REST APIs, TCP, and RabbitMQ. Choosing this architecture required evaluating trade-offs between development velocity, team expertise, and scalability requirements.
Mentoring & Team Development
A significant portion of the role involves developing team members. Tech Leads guide their teammates, conduct code reviews, and foster a culture of continuous learning.
My approach to mentoring was shaped by 1337 Coding School's peer-to-peer learning model. At 42 Network, there are no teachers-students learn by collaborating and reviewing each other's code. I brought this philosophy to Fygurs: thorough code reviews aren't about gatekeeping, they're teaching moments where both reviewer and author learn.
Communication & Stakeholder Management
Tech Leads act as mediators between the development team and stakeholders. They translate technical concepts for non-technical audiences and ensure alignment on project goals.
- Status reporting: Communicate progress, risks, and blockers
- Expectation management: Set realistic timelines and scope
- Technical translation: Explain complex concepts to stakeholders
Code Quality & Reviews
Tech Leads champion technical excellence and enforce quality standards across the team.
One of my first initiatives at Fygurs was optimizing our CI/CD pipelines, which reduced deployment times by 40%. I set up ESLint and Prettier with Turborepo caching, containerized our platform with Docker, and automated deployments to Azure Container Apps. These investments in tooling paid dividends in team velocity and code consistency.
- Coding standards: Define and enforce consistent practices
- Review process: Ensure thorough, constructive code reviews
- Best practices: Promote testing, documentation, clean code
- Tooling: Set up linters, formatters, CI/CD pipelines
Essential Skills
TECH LEAD SKILL SET ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ TECHNICAL SKILLS │ ├─────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┤ │ Programming │ System Design │ Infrastructure & DevOps │ │ Fundamentals │ │ │ ├─────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤ │ • Core languages│ • Scalability │ • CI/CD pipelines │ │ • Best practices│ • Database │ • Cloud platforms │ │ • Version control│ • API design │ • Monitoring & logging │ │ • Problem-solving│ • Performance │ • Security fundamentals │ └─────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┘ ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ LEADERSHIP SKILLS │ ├─────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┤ │ Communication │ Mentoring │ Decision Making │ ├─────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤ │ • Active listen │ • Pair program │ • Trade-off analysis │ │ • Clear writing │ • Code reviews │ • Risk assessment │ │ • Presentations │ • Career guide │ • Prioritization │ │ • Conflict res. │ • Knowledge share│ • Accountability │ └─────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┘
Time Management
Balancing coding with leadership duties is one of the biggest challenges. Tech Leads must stay technical enough to make informed decisions while not becoming a bottleneck.
Managing a team using Agile Scrum, I spend significant time on sprint planning, daily standups, and code reviews. But I intentionally protect time for hands-on work-whether it's implementing authentication flows, integrating Stripe payments, or deploying AI features with GPT-4o. Staying technical keeps me credible and helps me make better architectural decisions.
TIME ALLOCATION ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │ Coding & Technical Work Leadership & Management │ │ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ │ │ ████████████████████ ████████████████████████ │ │ 30-50% 50-70% │ │ │ │ • Unblock team • Code reviews │ │ • Set technical direction • Mentoring │ │ • Complex/critical code • Meetings │ │ • Proof of concepts • Planning │ │ • Architecture spikes • Documentation │ │ │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
What to Code
- Unblocking work: Tasks that enable the team to progress
- Technical direction: Foundational code that sets patterns
- Complex problems: Areas requiring deep expertise
- Proof of concepts: Validating technical approaches
What to Delegate
- Routine implementation: Standard feature development
- Well-defined tasks: Clear requirements, known patterns
Tech Lead vs Engineering Manager
These roles are often confused but have distinct focuses. Some organizations combine them, while others keep them separate.
TECH LEAD VS ENGINEERING MANAGER
┌─────────────────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────────────────┐
│ TECH LEAD │ │ ENGINEERING MANAGER │
├─────────────────────────────┤ ├─────────────────────────────┤
│ │ │ │
│ Focus: Technology │ │ Focus: People │
│ ("How") │ │ ("Who") │
│ │ │ │
│ • Architecture decisions │ │ • Career development │
│ • Code quality │ │ • Performance reviews │
│ • Technical mentorship │ │ • Hiring & onboarding │
│ • System design │ │ • Team health │
│ • Tool selection │ │ • Resource allocation │
│ │ │ │
│ Still codes: 30-50% │ │ Rarely codes: 0-20% │
│ │ │ │
│ No direct reports │ │ Has direct reports │
│ │ │ │
└─────────────────────────────┘ └─────────────────────────────┘
Building an Effective Team
Working remotely from Morocco with a Paris-based company taught me that team dynamics matter more than physical proximity. Clear communication, documented decisions, and async-friendly processes are essential for a distributed team.
Psychological Safety
Create an environment where engineers feel safe to ask questions, admit mistakes, and propose ideas without fear. This accelerates problem-solving and innovation.
At Fygurs, I learned that when someone breaks something in production, how you respond sets the tone for the entire team. We focus on "what went wrong" not "who did this" - and document the fix so everyone learns from it.
- Encourage questions: No question is too basic
- Normalize failure: Mistakes are learning opportunities
- Welcome ideas: Value input from everyone
- Blame-free postmortems: Focus on systems, not individuals
Autonomy with Guardrails
Trust your team to make decisions while providing clear boundaries and standards.
I define the architecture and coding standards, but I don't micromanage implementations. When assigning features, I explain the "what" and "why", then let teammates decide the "how". This builds ownership and often produces solutions I wouldn't have thought of.
- Define standards: Coding guidelines, review requirements
- Set goals, not tasks: Outcomes over specific implementations
- Be available: Support when needed, space when not
- Review, don't dictate: Guide decisions, don't make them all
Knowledge Sharing
Prevent knowledge silos and build team resilience through continuous learning.
Documentation is crucial for remote work. At Fygurs, we document architecture decisions, API contracts, and deployment procedures in Notion. When someone is unavailable, the team can still move forward because the knowledge isn't locked in one person's head.
- Documentation: Architecture decisions, runbooks, onboarding
- Pair programming: Spread knowledge across the team
- Code rotation: Expose everyone to different parts of the system
Common Challenges
Here are the challenges I've faced and how I addressed them:
Becoming a Bottleneck
Early on, I reviewed every pull request and made every architectural decision. The team slowed down waiting for me. I learned to trust my teammates and only review critical changes, letting others approve routine PRs.
Losing Technical Edge
Sprint planning, standups, and stakeholder meetings can consume your calendar. I protect dedicated coding blocks and prioritize working on complex features like authentication, payments, and AI integration to stay sharp.
Context Switching
Jumping between code reviews, architecture discussions, and debugging is mentally draining. I batch similar tasks together - mornings for deep coding work, afternoons for reviews and meetings.
Conclusion
Technical leadership is about amplifying your impact through others. While individual contributors create value through their own code, Tech Leads multiply that value by enabling the team to perform at their best.
My journey from Software Engineer to Technical Lead taught me that the transition isn't about becoming less technical-it's about applying technical skills differently. You still solve complex problems, but now you're also designing systems for your team to succeed: clear architecture, efficient processes, and a culture of continuous improvement.
Success requires balancing technical depth with leadership breadth-staying hands-on enough to make informed decisions while empowering your team to grow and deliver. The best Tech Leads create environments where engineers thrive, code quality is high, and technical direction is clear. They lead through influence, not authority, earning respect through expertise and service to their team.