Last week I wrote my response to the phrase, “We don’t need a tech lead”. This week I want to look at the other end of the spectrum, a team with multiple technical leaders. Firstly, I think having a team with multiple technical leaders can work, but in practice, I don’t see the same team led by multiple technical leaders at the same time often.

Situation A: Imagine a team of 4 developers. Now imagine that there are 2-3 tech leads. Feel a bit unbalanced? Yes. One could describe it as being a bit “top-heavy”. What would each tech lead be doing? Why do you need so many formal leaders for a small team. In this situation, it’s much more common to have a single tech lead.

Situation B: Imagine a team of 8 developers. Depending on the complexity of the domain and application, this is where you might consider splitting the tech lead role, or put differently, multiple tech leads. A single tech lead might be overwhelmed by the complexity, especially if they are newer to the role and still learning and building their tech lead skills. Having two tech leads might help distribute the responsibility and give each person time to do their tech lead duties well. In the happy case, these two tech leads work well as a tech leadership team (or pair).

Situation C: Imagine the same team of 8 developers led by two tech leads. Now imagine the two tech leads fundamentally disagree with each other’s style of building software. What happens? You might notice frequent conflict, team members are provided with contrasting advice/feedback. Although this should be a single team, you often end up with team members gravitating towards the tech lead who they find most sympathetic, aligned with their own styles and you end up with two mini-teams who have to find ways to work with, or more frequently, work around each other. The result is more accidental complexity than required for the product they are building. A good analogy is to imagine a hydra where each head wants to go in a different direction 🫣.

If you’re a manager who decides on team structures and staffing/team membership, you would be hoping for situations A or B, but also need to plan how to handle situation C. There are also often other practical reasons to have a single tech lead as it’s easier for other departments, and people from other teams to interact with a single point of contact instead of relaying context between several.

As Fred Brooks once wrote, “There is no silver bullet.” It depends.

Only a few more seats for the publicly scheduled Engineering Manager Essentials (Management track) training. More dates will be planned after European summer (on sale in Jul). Until then, consider using the summer time to level up your skills with self-paced courses at the http://techlead.academy