From Software Developer to Tech Lead: When Code Is No Longer Enough

You’re in the middle of planning. You still want to write code, and you have a clear idea of how the solution should be put together. You still feel that familiar satisfaction of taking a problem, going deep, and coming back with something that works.

Then, all of a sudden, the entire team is looking at you. Not because you have all the answers. But because they expect you to own the decision. Do you choose the quick fix or the long-term solution? Do you take the risk now or pay the price later? Do you optimise for speed or for stability?

That moment doesn’t feel dramatic. It just feels… new. And for many, that’s where the transition actually happens. Not when the title changes, but when the room starts waiting for you.

The obvious next step

The Tech Lead role is often presented as “the obvious next step.”

You’re good at what you do. You have a strong overview. You can take on the hard problems. You have opinions about architecture. You already help others. So it’s easy to see why Tech Lead is presented as the next step. And there is some truth in it. You usually get more influence, more say in direction, and a voice that carries more weight. You get to take the reins.

But being a Tech Lead is rarely just a step up. It’s also a step sideways. Because what changes isn’t only what you do. It’s how you create value. As a developer, you create value directly. You build something that works. As a Tech Lead, you create value indirectly. You enable others to build the right thing, in the right way, in the right direction.

And that’s a completely different craft.

Being a Tech Lead is rarely just a step up. It’s also a step sideways.

You didn’t get a new role, you got an extra job

One of the most common patterns we see with new Tech Leads is that they try to handle the transition by doing the same things as before, only more of them. They hold on to their old role because that’s where they feel competent. That’s where they feel progress. That’s where they get the reward. “I fixed it.”

At the same time, the new role slowly creeps in and takes up more and more of the day. More meetings. More interruptions. More coordination. More decisions landing on your desk. More questions. More situations where someone is waiting for you to take a stance. And suddenly, a reality appears that many Tech Leads recognise, but few say out loud. You didn’t get a new role.

You got an extra job.

We’ve seen this play out for years, and Søren Toft, my co-instructor on the Technical Leadership in Practice programme, once described it so precisely it almost hurts to hear:

“During the day, I had my new job. In the evening, I sat with my laptop and did my old one.”

Not because he was bad at planning. Not because he couldn’t prioritise. But because the kind of work that requires real focus rarely survives a calendar filled with meetings, questions, and interruptions. When you still have commitments to the sprint, the customers, and the team, but your day has turned into a mosaic of fragments, something predictable happens. You start “borrowing” time. First a little. Then more. Eventually it feels normal. And then you’re in it.

“During the day, I had my new job. In the evening, I sat with my laptop and did my old one.”

Your flow disappears (and so does your motivation)

Many people think the hard part of the Tech Lead role is not having time to code. That’s not entirely wrong. But it doesn’t go deep enough. What really disappears is flow. That feeling where you can sit with something for an extended stretch of time, understand the problem, spot the pattern, build the solution, clean it up, test it, land it, and feel the satisfaction of having created something.

Life as a Tech Lead often looks like the opposite. You start something, get interrupted, switch context, respond to a message, join a meeting, come back, and have to re-orient yourself. Then you’re interrupted again. This isn’t busyness. It’s friction. And friction wears on people who are used to delivering.

When you lose the ability to focus deeply, you also start to lose your sense of competence. Not because you’re incapable, but because you rarely get to finish anything. The feedback loop breaks. And doubt starts to creep in quietly:

“Am I actually getting worse?”
“Why can’t I seem to get anything done?”
“Is there something about this role I just don’t understand?”

Often, the answer is much simpler. The role is designed to split your attention.

Uncertainty is the real enemy

One of the most draining parts of the transition into a Tech Lead role isn’t the pressure. It’s the uncertainty. What is actually expected of you? Are you an architect, a project manager, a lightweight Scrum Master, a mentor, or the person who jumps in and fixes everything when things hit the fan?

Many Tech Leads end up in a role that’s hard to pin down. It’s shaped by the organisation, the maturity of the team, the state of the product, and how responsibility tends to work where you are. And that makes it difficult to feel confident that you’re doing the right thing. When expectations are unclear, you’re left relying on your own judgement. And if you’re someone who takes responsibility seriously, that judgement can push you to do more, not better. Which is often why Tech Leads end up working harder at exactly the moment they need to change how they work.

When you become the smartest person in the room, you also become the biggest risk

There’s another dynamic that almost always follows. You’re a Tech Lead because you know things. You can do things. You see problems others don’t see yet. You have experience, intuition, and a mental library of “I’ve seen this before”. That makes you valuable. But it also makes you a risk.

Teams tend to reward the person who knows the most in a way that feels good in the short term and dangerous in the long term. When something is urgent, difficult, or unclear, people come to you.

And you take it on because you can. You fix it because it works. You step in because it feels responsible. But the more everything runs through you, the more fragile the team becomes. You end up being both the accelerator and the bottleneck at the same time. And it’s a strange place to be. You’re the person who makes things better, while also being the reason they can’t get better without you.

You have experience, intuition, and a mental library of “I’ve seen this before”. That makes you valuable. But it also makes you a risk.

Fixing things feels like strength, but it behaves like debt

This is where a lot of Tech Leads get stuck, often without realising it. Fixing things quickly feels good. It feels efficient. It feels professional. It even feels like leadership. And when deadlines are tight and expectations are high, it’s easy to mistake a fast solution for a good one.

The problem is that the instinct to fix things doesn’t scale. Every time you step in and solve the problem for someone else, you get a small win now and a bigger cost later. Because you’ve just taught the team something simple. When things get hard, go to you.

So they do. Next time. And the time after that. And after that. It’s technical debt, just not in code. You can pay it back later, sure. But the interest adds up. It shows up as constant interruptions, growing dependency, bottlenecks everywhere, and evenings spent reopening your laptop when the day should really be over.

The real shift: from output to impact

There’s a reason this transition can feel like a shock to your professional identity. As a developer, you’re measured by output. What did you build? What did you deliver? What did you ship?

As a Tech Lead, you’re measured by impact. What became clearer? What got easier? What worked better because you were there?

That is why you can spend a day where you’ve worked hard, made important decisions, set direction, and prevented problems, and still end it feeling like you didn’t get anything done. There’s no pull request that says, “Here’s the proof.” Because the Tech Lead role is largely about the things that don’t show up as a “commit”. Decisions start to matter more than lines of code. Clarity matters more than speed. Making others better matters more than being the best yourself. And if that shift isn’t made explicit, the role can feel like a loss. Less hands-on work. Less control. Less satisfaction. But what’s actually happening is a transformation. You’re moving from building things to building systems and people.

What’s actually happening is a transformation. You’re moving from building things to building systems and people.

When you stop being “the answer”, the team starts to grow. One of the most counterintuitive parts of the Tech Lead role is that things often get better when you do less of what you’re best at. Not because you stop being technical, but because you can’t be technical in the same way as before.

At first, things slow down. There’s more uncertainty. More pauses. More questions. More time spent thinking. And it can feel like productivity is dropping.

But it isn’t disappearing. It’s shifting. From you to the team. When you ask questions instead of giving answers, the team learns to think. When you help others see consequences, they learn to choose. When you hold back the solution, you make space for others to find it. That’s where independence is built. And that’s where you gradually free yourself to focus on what otherwise keeps getting postponed. Direction. Architecture. Quality. Long-term decisions.

This isn’t soft skills, it’s hardcore operational stability

There’s an old misconception in tech that refuses to die.

That anything involving people is “soft”.
That coaching is “nice to have”.

That feedback and communication are secondary. When in reality, this is some of the hardest work there is. Because these are exactly the things that decide whether a team is resilient or fragile. If everything depends on you, the system is fragile. If the team can think and act without you, the system is strong.

This isn’t just culture. This is how you build operational stability.

And this is also why the Tech Lead role can feel so strange. You can find yourself in the middle of a technical problem and suddenly realise that the right solution isn’t more technology, but better collaboration, better decisions, and clearer ownership.

You can’t win the Tech Lead role by working more hours. When people hit the wall in this role, they often try to solve it with speed. More hours. More pressure. More “I’ll just take this one as well”. It works… for a while. But it turns the ‘extra job’ problem into something permanent. The role only becomes sustainable when the focus shifts. Not to less responsibility, but to responsibility being placed more deliberately. When you try to do everything yourself, you become a hero. When you help others become capable, you become a Tech Lead. That’s the difference that makes the role last.

Feeling pulled in two directions is part of the role

If you’re in this transition right now and feel pulled in two directions, there’s something important to know:

That tension isn’t a sign that you’re failing at the role. It’s a sign that you’ve started to understand it.

You’re still a technologist. That part stays with you. But now you’re also a catalyst. You still build. And you also enable others to build. That’s why it can begin to feel like code on its own isn’t enough anymore. Because the real transition isn’t from software developer to Tech Lead. It’s from fixer to multiplier.

When that shift settles, the role doesn’t just become easier. It becomes meaningful. Because when code is no longer enough, it’s not that technology has lost its value. It’s that it can’t carry the role by itself anymore.

If you’d like to watch a webinar on the transition to Tech Lead, you can find it here.