Engineering/Tech Lead Role in Software Delivery
Happy New Year 2026, over the holidays, I have been reflecting on the role of engineering/tech lead in a team, based on my experience over the last couple of years playing this role.
I found it to be the missing piece in a number teams I have worked with on my software delivery journey. The biggest challenges are justifying the investment for the role, then finding an appropriate person to fill it across multiple projects.
This post explores my experiences in the role and how it can set the foundation for greater customer value creation and developer growth.
The Context
The first team where this came to light was well resourced with backend & frontend engineers, product managers, quality assurance, a UI/UX designer and a scrum master. As the tech/engineering lead my role was a bridge between the different roles:
- Engineering team - PR review, design and implementation details, planning out how to handle issues, resolve technical debt and automate delivery to remove the human in the middle
- Product managers, QA, UI/UX - was providing engineering input to the design process, planning out sprint goals to meet business objectives
- Scrum Master - meeting sprint goals
- Product Owner - aligning engineering to business goals
The role essentially involved translating product requirements into actual engineering and code requirements. The team followed a three-week sprint cycle, with a target to deploy the outputs of each sprint, while tackling both new feature development, alongside bug fixes, and product enhancements.
The sprint planning with the product team was always 4-5 sprints ahead, though we would re-evaluate each sprint goals based on feedback and progress.
I applied the same principles in a follow on role with a smaller team that had a Project Manager, backend engineers and a shared frontend engineer, that was maintaining and evolving an exisiting service, the
Day-to-Day Responsibilities
Bridging Product and Engineering
My day-to-day role involved sitting with the product team and understanding the drivers behind requirements, then adding an engineering overview at a high level. This was without detailed design initially, because engineering typically shouldn’t drive all the decisions—they should be driven by product, which has focus on the customer.
We would discuss high-level requirements and provide engineering input on how complex it would be to implement given the existing infrastructure. There is always a balance between new features, tech debt, bug fixes and product improvements.
Ensuring Team Alignment
After discussions with the product team on high level approaches for implementation, I would review those plans in detail with the engineering team—both frontend and backend—to ensure alignment in direction. A crucial part was figuring out how to get these teams working in lockstep.
When you have separate backend and frontend teams, the frontend team is usually a sprint behind because the backend team usually needs to put the APIs in place first, while there are options for mocking we found that it was not a worthwhile investment for our team as there was always lots to do.
Managing API Evolution
APIs are never “finished” during the development cycle, we usually found additional needs by the frontend team usually to simplify and reduce API calls, computation and business logic metadata for the UI, etc, however these were never showstoppers for due to the initial design discussions.
The Core Value Proposition
Defining What to Build
The hardest thing in software delivery, is definining what to build.
By having a multi-step technical documentation step led by the business value, the engineering/tech lead provides a clear handoff to the engineering team, making a smoother transition.
This approach really helps developers spend their time building out features and fixing bugs rather than spinning their wheels, the QA, who in our case had an business value focus during testing so would do product walkthroughs and provide input from a user experience perspective along with the UX designer.
The Documentation
- The product team wrote user stories, which I loved as they elaborated a user flow to achieve a specific business goal. The intial focus was the primary flow, with common exception and alternate flows also being documented
- The engineering notes are in two sections:
- Overall approach - architecture, design decisions, patterns etc, this gives the developers the overall context
- Detailed design - model changes, sample API documentation, code changes as each of these will become tickets to be implemented
- I always add a section for assumptions, open issues and dependencies - which allows the tracking of potential future activities, including technical debt fixes as well as refactoring plans
Business Requirements Meet Engineering Solutions
This flow made sense from a business perspective. You have business requirements driving the process, and engineering solving problems. The engineering lead acts as a bridge and maintains both perspectives—the product side and the engineering side.
This helps smooth out what I think of as the object-relational mapping impedance mismatch. You have two different paradigms, and you have to make sure they’re working together instead of working against each other.
Conclusion
In this role, you need a strong software delivery practice background, enjoy writing documentation (which is hard) as well as continously work with the engineering team to grow their skillsets and capabilities.
The engineering/tech lead role is critical because it:
- Translates product vision into technical requirements
- Ensures alignment between product and engineering teams
- Coordinates frontend and backend delivery by the engineering teams
- Drives the documentation process for technical decisions, architecture and implementation design decisions
- Reduces friction in the software delivery process between business needs and engineering capabilities
- Enables developers to focus on building while having their inputs in the design process
IMO this role truly is the missing piece that makes software delivery smoother and more effective.