Читать книгу EMPOWERED - Marty Cagan - Страница 47

I absolutely love coaching tech leads. More often than not, these are the people behind the world's most impressive innovations.

A tech lead is essentially a senior‐level engineer who has taken on the additional responsibility of participating in the ongoing product discovery work. The tech lead is the key partner to the product manager and product designer.

They are asked to care not just about building and delivering reliable products, but also to care about what gets built.

Tech leads bring deep knowledge of the enabling technologies, and when that knowledge is combined with a direct understanding of the customer's pain and problems, magic can result.

If you've spent any real time with engineers, you know that not all engineers are interested in anything beyond coding, and that's fine. We don't need every engineer to become a tech lead.

I will say that many of my favorite product companies try to screen for this when they interview engineers—they want engineers who care just as much about what they build as how they build it. But even these companies make exceptions. It's only a problem if you don't have at least one such person on a product team, especially if you hope to be an empowered product team.

A surprising percentage of the tech leads I've coached have told me that, ultimately, they would like to one day start a company of their own. I strongly encourage this and point out to them the many successful CEOs in tech who started as engineers. When this is their goal, I often encourage the tech lead to consider the product management role for a year or two. Even if they go back to engineering, this experience is invaluable and positions them much better for a startup co‐founder role.

No matter what their career goals, the real potential of a tech lead comes from combining their understanding of technology with an appreciation for the issues customers struggle with.

I always encourage tech leads to visit as many customers as they can. But I also try to make a point—after visiting an interesting customer myself—to stop by and chat with the tech leads about what I saw and learned, and what they might think about that.

The bottom line is I have found that every single minute you invest in coaching a tech lead on either customers or business context will be among the best possible uses of your time.