Being a tech lead in an empowered product team is not a purely technical role. In addition to your typical engineering duties, you are a part of the product manager/tech lead/product designer trifecta and you collaborate on product decisions.

In this post, I want to talk about how the tech lead role is different and what I consider essential to being successful in it. I’m drawing on my own experience of being a tech lead as well as the experiences of my product manager friends who helped me see it from the other side.

Collaborating on product as a tech lead means you need to work together with your product manager and designer to discover and solve problems for your customers.

You ensure, as partners, that the features you build are valuable (your customers will find them useful), feasible (you can build them), usable (your customers can use them) and viable (they work for your business). To do this successfully, you have to combine your unique expertise and collaborate closely in an environment of trust.