Technical Leadership
Setting direction and carrying accountability without a team reporting to you.
5 to work through
-
intermediate
An engineer moves into a technical leadership role and finds their old approach no longer works. What changes?
2 min answer -
intermediate
What distinguishes technical leadership from technical seniority, and how is it measured?
2 min answer -
advanced
What changes when you move from making architectural decisions to being responsible for how an organisation makes them?
2 min answer -
advanced
You are the first architect at a 200-engineer company with no architecture function. What do you do in the first three months?
3 min answer -
advanced
You join a platform group and find four teams have each written their own retry-and-backoff library, with different defaults, and a fifth team has none. Everyone knows this is duplicated. Nobody has consolidated it. What is the diagnosis, and what do you change?
3 min answer
Neighbouring topics
Meta-Skills
General material on how architects think and work.
Systems Thinking
Interactions and feedback loops rather than isolated components.
Trade-off Analysis
Making costs explicit and comparable rather than asserting a preference.
First-Principles Reasoning
Reducing to physics, mathematics and economics, then reasoning up.
Failure Thinking
Asking of every box and arrow how it fails and how you would know.
Constraint Thinking
Designing for the budget, skills and regulations that actually exist.
Pattern Recognition
Seeing a familiar problem, and checking whether the forces match.
Pragmatism
The simplest architecture that meets the requirements usually wins.
Judgement Under Uncertainty
Choosing the best worst case when information is missing.
Business Understanding
Connecting a design to the outcome that pays for it.
Influence Without Authority
Getting decisions adopted when you cannot mandate them.
Mentoring
Growing architectural judgement in other people.
Continuous Learning
Staying current without chasing every new thing.
Estimation
Sizing work and cost honestly, with the uncertainty stated.
Prioritisation
Choosing what not to do, and defending it.
Research & Evaluation
Assessing a technology quickly without adopting it by accident.
Handling Ambiguity
Making progress when the requirements are not yet knowable.
Ethics in Architecture
Privacy, accessibility, sustainability and the consequences of a design.
Career Development
Growing from senior engineer to architect and beyond.