Senior to Tech Lead: Modules
The program helps a senior engineer build the habits needed to own a team's technical direction: recording decisions, carrying quality standards to the team, planning work under uncertainty and leading calmly during an incident. The focus is the shift from your own code to the team's outcome.
01
Role transition and boundaries of responsibility
The difference between a senior engineer and a tech lead, and how to split time between hands-on work and leadership.
- Common variants of the tech lead role
- Mismatch between responsibility and authority
- Share of hands-on work and what blocks it
- Agreeing expectations with your manager
- A 30-60-90 day plan
Lab: Write a role expectations and time allocation document for your own team's real situation.
02
Technical direction and roadmap
Tie technical debt, product priorities and team capacity into one plan.
- Technical vision and principles
- Classifying technical debt
- Prioritising by risk and value
- Aligning the roadmap with the product plan
- Showing context with a C4 diagram
Lab: A two-quarter technical roadmap for a fictional e-commerce backend, with the prioritisation rationale.
03
Decision making and ADRs
Make it traceable who decided what, with which information, and why.
- Reversible and irreversible decisions
- ADR structure: context, options, consequences
- Consensus versus advice process
- Revisiting and superseding decisions
- Separating facts from needs in a technical dispute
Lab: Write three alternatives and one ADR for a given monolith decomposition scenario and defend it in a simulated discussion.
04
Quality standards and review culture
Deliver code review, test strategy and standards as a shared language, not a burden.
- Purpose of review: finding defects, sharing knowledge, setting standards
- Review checklist versus automation versus human review
- Pull Request size and flow
- Test pyramid and acceptance criteria
- Backing standards with lint and CI
Lab: Review a series of Pull Requests and draft the review rules to propose to the team.
05
Estimation and planning under uncertainty
Work with risk, assumptions and ranges instead of promising exact dates.
- Presenting estimates as ranges and assumptions
- Spikes and early risk reduction
- Slicing work into releasable parts
- Mapping dependencies and bottlenecks
- Communicating when the plan changes
Lab: Decomposition, risk register and range estimate for a feature with unclear requirements.
06
Mentoring, delegation and feedback
Grow the team's capability: what to delegate, to whom, and with how much context.
- Delegation levels and passing context
- Development conversations and goals
- Concrete, behaviour-focused feedback
- Pair programming and knowledge sharing
- Reducing single points of knowledge
Lab: A delegation plan and a feedback conversation script (role play) for three engineers at different experience levels.
07
Incident leadership and postmortems
Role split under pressure, communication, and a blameless postmortem.
- Incident roles: coordinator, communications, technical
- Severity levels and status updates
- Timeline and root cause analysis
- Blameless postmortem and action items
- Preventing recurrence and follow-up
Lab: Build a timeline and postmortem document from simulated incident logs.
08
Stakeholder communication
Explain technical risk and trade-offs to product and business in their own language.
- Tailoring the message to the audience
- Explaining risk and compromise
- Saying no and offering an alternative
- Written status and decision memos
- Escalation criteria
Lab: A short memo and a five-minute spoken pitch asking a business stakeholder to allocate time for technical debt.