In this occasion we are going to talk about one of the most important roles in medium or large-sized teams. Typically absent in small teams, small businesses, or companies that don't have a mature software development culture, the Technical Lead is one of the most important roles to ensure the quality of development and therefore the professional growth of the developers under his/her supervision.

Normally a Tech Lead has at least two developers under his/her supervision, he/she is a senior profile but also acts as a mentor and guide. It's rare to find someone who can dedicate their full working day to this role, so it's likely that he/she will also develop like any other senior member of the team. Furthermore, in small businesses, this person rises to the top of the hierarchy, covering the responsibilities of a CTO as well.

Without further ado, let's see the most common responsibilities.

Internal communication

One of his/her main responsibilities: ensuring that the team works smoothly and there are no technical blocks or any doubts about the requirements. To achieve this, it's most likely that he/she will be having constant meetings with the developers and be very present in the team's chat tool. In the case of a technical block, he/she will conduct an investigation and present the solution to the team. In case of a doubt about the requirements, he/she should communicate with the Project Manager to resolve it as soon as possible.

Technical ticket management

Once the Project Manager has transferred the client's needs into tickets, the Tech Lead will be responsible for reviewing each of those tickets and adding all the technical information necessary for the developer to have a well-defined and scaled scope and to have the least number of doubts. This way, the work is facilitated and efficiency is increased because there is less chance that the solution provided by the development team is not what the client had in mind.

Research and development

It often happens that during the management of technical tickets, the Tech Lead detects a technical block, i.e., something that he/she doesn't even know how to solve. This is where the Tech Lead will have to initiate an investigation, such as:

• Evaluating the different options available to a problem that can be solved by integrating a third-party library. Searching for options, comparisons, etc.
• Proof of concepts of the different solutions that a problem may have to better predict the sustainability of the solution in the long term.
• Evaluating if a problem can be solved with an unknown technology at the time for the team, such as a different database engine, a different framework, etc.
• Having meetings with vendors to coordinate the integration of some product, and understand how it works.
• At the end of any of these investigations, he/she should communicate the conclusions to the development team by completing the technical tickets.

Coordinating tasks between different developers in the same project

The Tech Lead should know the strengths and weaknesses of each of the team members. Therefore, the efficiency of the team can be improved if the Tech Lead is responsible for assigning certain tasks to the person he knows will do it best. Similarly, if the Tech Lead considers that someone needs more experience in a specific task, he can assign the task to that person to improve. Without a doubt, the best Tech Leads will know how to measure the moment in which the project is and assign tasks to the appropriate people to find a balance between the progress of the project and the progress of the skills of the team members.

Review Pull/Merge Requests

This is where the Tech Lead can make a greater impact in improving the code of the project and the knowledge of the developers. Whenever possible and if he has time, it should be his number one priority in the technical aspect. Today, code storage platforms provide very complete tools for the user to review code made by others. In this case, the Tech Lead should take advantage of his position as the team's most experienced technical person to detect errors and inefficiencies in the code and consistency between the code that is intended to be added to the project and the code that already exists. It is important to keep in mind that he has to automate the code review process as much as possible with tools such as a linter, since reviewing code is one of the tasks that consumes the most time.

Conclusion

As you have been able to observe, the majority of the responsibilities of a Tech Lead require what are called "soft" skills. So it is not difficult to guess that the role of Tech Lead will not be easy to fill or find in our sector, as in addition to needing a person with great technical skills and experience, they need a person with high communication skills, not forgetting that to get the most out of it, they also have to have a teaching vocation as they have to act as a mentor. This entails that it is a very well-paid role, although most of the time, it means that companies dispense with this role, making the mistake of thinking that their responsibilities do not need to be covered. In reality, a software project cannot be carried out adequately without paying attention to these needs and therefore, they will end up being covered by one or several of the senior developers in a probably not so efficient way.

Cheers!