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Sign inThe hardest part of becoming a tech lead isn’t new skills — it’s unlearning the instinct that made you a great engineer: doing the work yourself. Your output is now the team’s output.
Where your leverage moves
Low effort
High effort
Low leverage
Answering the same question 1:1 repeatedly.
Heads-down coding a ticket yourself.
High leverage
A 2-line review comment that prevents a bad pattern spreading.
A design doc + review that aligns the whole team for a quarter.
⚠
The hero-coder trap
If you keep taking the hardest tickets yourself, you become the bottleneck and the team stops growing. The lead’s job is to make the team faster than you alone ever could be.
What actually fills your week now
- Reviews (code + design) — where you prevent expensive mistakes cheaply.
- Planning + sequencing — turning ambiguity into a shippable order of work.
- Unblocking — removing the thing stalling someone else.
- Direction — the small number of calls that shape everything downstream.
Takeaway
Your job is leverage, not lines of code. Trade heads-down coding for reviews, planning, unblocking and direction — the team’s throughput is your scoreboard.