You got promoted for coding. Now your job isn’t to code.
The best engineers get promoted to tech lead. Then they keep doing what made them successful: writing code. This is how teams stall.
A tech lead’s job is three things. Alignment: making sure the team builds the right thing. Clarity: removing ambiguity before it becomes blocked PRs. Shield: absorbing organizational noise so engineers can focus.
None of these requires a keyboard. Their IDE is the calendar and the whiteboard.
The tech lead who ships the most code is doing someone else’s job. Meanwhile, requirements stay fuzzy. Dependencies stay unresolved. Junior engineers remain stuck.
The transition is hard because it feels like a regression. “If I stop coding, will I still be valued?” Yes, but through impact, not output. You were the best coder. Now you’re in meetings. The work feels invisible. But the output isn’t your commits-it’s the team’s commits.
A senior engineer makes themselves productive. A tech lead makes everyone else productive. One great coder is one great coder. One person who makes five others slightly better changes everything.
What percentage of your tech lead’s time goes to making others faster?