approach
Technical Leadership
Why a lead is not simply the strongest engineer, and how leadership should multiply a team instead of becoming its bottleneck.
A technical leader is not just the person who can solve the hardest task alone.
The useful question is whether the person increases the capability of the team around them: clarifies trade-offs, creates decision boundaries, raises engineering judgment, and reduces dependency on themselves over time.
This is why a middle engineer with ownership instincts can sometimes become a better lead than a senior engineer who remains the central escalation point.