My Next Chapter at Brigit - Tech Lead

In mid-September of this year, I was asked to take on the tech lead role on Brigit's Membership engineering team. This was an incredible milestone for me, as I'd had been working my way towards a leadership role.

Now that this opportunity is in front of me, I've slowed down to think about what the expectations are for a tech lead, and how this opportunity is aligned with my goals.

What are my aspirations?

I graduated college with a bachelors in Biology, with the intent to join the University of Pacific's 3 year dental program after spending a year learning the business side of dentistry. I joined a dental startup that summer and soon realized that I enjoyed the intersection of startups and software.

I pursued software engineering on the side, and eventually enrolled in a coding bootcamp. My dream was to build software at high growth startups, and eventually found my own tech venture. The transition was difficult since I hadn't taken any computer science classes in college.

For the last 4 years, I worked as a software engineer at startups - building new products and maintaining existing. ones.

Leading an engineering team, is the next chapter in this journey. I want to gain some practical experience with leadership and management before starting my own venture. Here are some of the things I'm looking forward to.

  • Scale Brigit's products to millions more users
  • Develop a sharp intuition for business and technical decisions
  • Prioritize, scope and manage technical project delivery
  • Help my team grow into the next group of senior engineers and engineering leads at Brigit

What makes a good tech lead?

Recently, I've watched a video where Patrick Shu explains how he became a Google Tech Lead. I found it enlightening, as I've been thinking about how one becomes a good tech lead.

In short, he describes a teach lead as a senior engineer who's the point of contact for the engineering manager, engineers, product manager, design, and other teams. As an engineer grows into a tech lead position, their focus shifts from individual work to managing and coordinating projects. This includes work such as

  1. Scoping
  2. Project management
  3. Approving design documents
  4. Taking on new technical initiatives
  5. Guiding coding direction
  6. Mentorship
  7. Helping new members of the team ramp up
  8. Communicating the team's efforts with team members and stakeholders

I've also talked with Shuo, my engineering manager, who has worked as a tech lead at Palantir and Brigit. He has explained that a good tech lead excels in four categories: technical ownership, mentorship, technical skills and communication.

Technical Ownership: the person’s holistic scope and responsibility

  • Are they proactively identifying risks?
  • Do they think about the direction of the product and the tradeoffs that might be made to achieve various goals?
  • Do they keep business objectives in mind?
  • Do they keep the end to end customer experience in mind, outside of just the scope of their individual feature, but rather how it works with everything else.
  • Are they active about measuring things, whether those things are business metrics or software metrics?

Mentorship: the person’s ability to grow others

  • Are they effective at onboarding new team members and getting them up to speed?
  • Do they delegate work effectively?
  • Do they spend adequate time on code reviews, pairing, etc. as needed for their teammates?
  • Are they effective at collecting and delivering feedback, both praise and constructive criticism?

Technical skills: the person’s aptitude in their given area

  • Do they understand how the stack for their product fits together?
  • Are they an effective fallback for debugging gnarly issues?

Communication: the person’s ability to interface with other teams

  • Do they effectively communicate progress to stakeholders?
  • Do they preemptively relay delays?
  • Are they adamant about gathering continued requirements and feedback from stakeholders?

What are my priorities for the next 6 months?

So far, I've been transitioning off the Credit Builder team. After Thanksgiving, I'll be formally transitioning onto the Membership team. I see this transition happening in three phases.

First, it's to onboard into the tech lead role. I want to go through some sprints with the team, and observe how they're running things. It'll help me understand what people expect and are having struggle with. It'll also help me understand the projects we are working on, and upcoming projects for the quarter.

Second, is to start tackling the "how we're building things" part of the challenge by taking on work and collaborating with other engineers on technical challenges. My expectation is that I'll have to coach, guide and teach other team members how to work through technical challenges and parts of the code they're unfamiliar with.

Finally, is to help answer the "what we're building" by collaborating with product and design on the problems we're solving, figuring out what to prioritize, and how those translate into engineering deliverables.