So, you wanna be a team lead

There comes a point in most developer’s career when you’ll start wondering whether or not to become a team lead.

Maybe you’ve received some positive feedback that you’re good with people. Maybe your team has been without a leader for a while, and you’ve naturally stepped into more of a technical lead role.

But there’s still a part of you that’s hesitant.

Until now, you’ve spent years honing your craft - not just being a good developer, but a great one. You’ve reached a point where coding mostly comes naturally. It doesn’t require the same effort it once did. Maybe there’s even a little prestige and ego involved. A reputation as the developer that people want on their team.

So let’s break this thing down:

1. What even is a team lead?
2. Is it different from an engineering manager?
3. What if I don’t like it? Is this a one-way journey?
4. How to position yourself to be asked
5. How to make sure that you succeed

What even is a team lead?

Team lead is a nebulous title. It’s hard to pin down at the best of times, and that’s before you account for differences between organizations. (In my first lead role, HR had me down as an Assistant Informatics Coordinator. Glamorous, right?)

So think of it like this:
As with many things in life, the answer lies on a spectrum.

At the most technical end, you have the technical lead. Think of them as strong senior devs who (often begrudgingly) attend a few more meetings - and (occasionally) have opinions that extend beyond the current sprint.

At the other end, you have engineering managers. In some organizations, these are professional management roles with little or no current technical experience. They might have written code once, but it will have been in a language no one wants to remember.

Between those two extremes lies the team lead - more managerial than a tech lead, but more technical than an EM. In startup land, they are mostly emergent of growing companies - and rarely ever actually hired for.

This spectrum is why the role feels so fuzzy. Some team leads lean technical, others toward people and process. A great one morphs before your eyes to match the needs of the team.

In today’s tech orgs, team leads aren’t bosses so much as team principals. They’re the destination for technical questions, both from inside and out. They’re expected to own team outcomes and team wellbeing.

Tricky? You bet!
But you love a challenge, right?

And all this happens, whilst operating under one of tech’s greatest fallacies:
Management skills are inherent. Born with. Natural. Requiring absolutely no training.

Quick-fire (in)sanity check: what do team leads actually do?

• Run meetings? Sometimes, if you want to.
• Populate the backlog? Only if your PM is a bad collaborator.
• Work out the roadmap? Definitely.
• Stakeholder management? Hopefully mostly your PM’s job — but you’ve gotta be flying the same flag.
• Code? Yes. But not as much as you’d like.
• One-on-ones? You betcha.
• Hiring, firing, and performance? Probably not. You’ve got leadership for that.

But What If I Don’t Like It?

Becoming a team lead is a big transition. It requires an entirely different skill set than what you’ve developed so far. You now need to think (and care) about feelings. Not just what gets done - but how.

Worse still, most promotions to team lead are what I call battlefield promotions. Not so much careful planned, as scrambling to adapt to the situation on the ground.

The good news?

I’ve never, ever seen someone try being a team lead, not like it, and be stuck there.

If you’re a solid senior dev, any VP with half-a-brain will happily give you your old job back.

In my own journey, I’ve been promoted to team lead three separate times. Each time, I left that org for a new IC opportunity… and then within a year, I was back in a lead role again.

Even if you’re on the fence, try it for six months. You can often frame it as a trial run. Lead a project from start to finish. And if you walk away at the end, you will still have gained a new appreciation for how the “other half” of tech operates - and that’ll make you a better IC.

Getting Your First Team Lead Role

In over a decade in tech, I’ve never once seen someone hired directly into a team lead position without any internal track record. And especially not someone without prior experience.

Every company likes to believe they’re their own special snowflake, and “do things differently”, but the only time I’ve seen external hires for leads, it’s still been with the understanding that they’ll start as an IC for 3–6 months before stepping up into the role.

Startups are a little different. They usually want doers, not leads - but if the company survives a year or two, someone will probably emerge as team lead (out of necessity).

So if you can’t be hired directly into the role, you’ll have got to grow into it internally.

Step one: Say something.

If you’ve read this far, you’re more than casually curious. Good. Now make sure someone knows.

You’d be amazed how many people quietly resent their leadership for not psychically guessing they wanted to lead.

If you’ve got the relationship, bring it up in a 1:1 with your VP, director, or team lead. You’re allowed to hedge it with some uncertainty:

“I’ve been thinking about…”
“Maybe next year it’d be fun to try…”
“I’d love to give it a go…”

If you don’t have that kind of access, make sure whoever you report to knows.

Step two: Become the obvious choice.

You want to make it so obvious to everyone watching that you’re already doing the job - the title becomes a formality.

Start small. Get yourself an intern. Most companies have intern programs, and interns are basically just long-term interviews (with puppy energy). It’s the shallow end of management.

If you’ve done that before, buddy up with a junior. Be their mentor. Maybe that starts within your current team, maybe it becomes across teams.

When your lead goes on vacation? Step in.
Someone goes on parental leave? Keep the project running.

All of these are proving grounds. You’re building credibility before the opportunity arrives.

How to Succeed

Bad news:
You’re gonna suck.

Good news:
Everyone sucks…at the start.

The first month of being a team lead was the most mentally exhausting thing I’ve ever done. I went from owning two codebases to… forty. From answering to one person, to six. Suddenly I had new interfaces, contracts, stakeholders. None of them came with any documentation, only unrealized expectations.

I had a chronic case of not knowing enough.

• Who the people on my team were
• What we were actually responsible for
• How or where anything ran

There were fires everywhere, and no way to even know which were the biggest - but they all looked scary.

And then there’s the fear.

Someone trusted you with this. They think you can do it. They probably vouched for you. And what? You’re going to disappoint them? Let everyone know you really were an imposter the whole time?

It’s a lot. It’s overwhelming.

But in six months, you’ll laugh about it.

Your greatest asset right now? Humility.

You will be wrong - often. About almost everything. Own it. Be open about figuring things out. When something slips through the cracks, admit it. Improve your process. Do better next time.

Tell the team to call you out. Invite reminders. It’s a tough job. But you’re not alone - your team wants you to succeed too, let them help.

The cruel irony? The best team leads make it all look effortless.

TL;DR

1. It’s just a more senior dev role → Nope. The job changes. So do the skills.

2. You’ll still code as much → You won’t. And that’s okay.

3. You get more power → Not really. You get more responsibility, with less control.

4. It’s the next logical career step → Only if you want it to be.

5. You have to be an extrovert → Good leads come in all personality types.