No team can function well without a leader, where engineering is almost exclusively a team endeavor. A Manager is a leader of people, whereas a Tech Lead leads technology efforts. Although the responsibilities of these two roles require similar planning skills, they require quite different people skills.

A boat without a captain is nothing more than a floating waiting room: unless someone grabs the rudder and starts the engine, it’s just going to drift along aimlessly with the current.

A piece of software is just like that boat: if no one pilots it, you’re left with a group of engineers burning up valuable time, just sitting around waiting for something to happen (or worse, still writing code that you don’t need). Although this post is about people management and technical leadership, it is still worth a read if you’re an individual contributor because it will likely help you understand your own leaders a bit better.

Managers and Tech Leads (and Both)

Whereas every engineering team generally has a leader, they acquire those leaders in different ways. Sometimes an experienced manager comes in to run a team, and sometimes an individual contributor is promoted into a leadership position (usually of a smaller team).

In nascent teams, both roles will sometimes be filled by the same person: a Tech Lead Manager (TLM). On larger teams, an experienced people manager will step in to take on the management role while a senior engineer with extensive experience will step into the tech lead role. Even though manager and tech lead each play an important part in the growth and productivity of an engineering team, the people skills required to succeed in each role are wildly different.

The Engineering Manager

Many companies bring in trained people managers who might know little to nothing about software engineering to run their engineering teams. However, that its software engineering managers should have an engineering background. This meant hiring experienced managers who used to be software engineers, or training software engineers to be managers.

At the highest level, an engineering manager is responsible for the performance, productivity, and happiness of every person on their team — including their tech lead — while still making sure that the needs of the business are met by the product for which they are responsible. Because the needs of the business and the needs of individual team members don’t always align, this can often place a manager in a difficult position.

The Tech Lead

The tech lead (TL) of a team — who will often report to the manager of that team — is responsible for (surprise!) the technical aspects of the product, including technology decisions and choices, architecture, priorities, velocity, and general project management (although on larger teams they might have program managers helping out with this). The TL will usually work hand in hand with the engineering manager to ensure that the team is adequately staffed for their product and that engineers are set to work on tasks that best match their skill sets and skill levels. Most TLs are also individual contributors, which often forces them to choose between doing something quickly themselves or delegating it to a team member to do (sometimes) more slowly. The latter is most often the correct decision for the TL as they grow the size and capability of their team.

The Tech Lead Manager

On small and nascent teams for which engineering managers need a strong technical skill set, the default is often to have a “TLM: a single person who can handle both the people and technical needs of their team”. Sometimes, a TLM is a more senior person, but more often than not, the role is taken on by someone who was, until recently, an individual contributor.

In well-established teams to have a pair of leaders — one TL and one engineering manager — working together as partners. The theory is that it’s really difficult to do both jobs at the same time (well) without completely burning out, so it’s better to have two specialists crushing each role with dedicated focus.

The job of TLM is a tricky one and often requires the TLM to learn how to balance individual work, delegation, and people management. As such, it usually requires a high degree of mentoring and assistance from more experienced TLMs.