You’re a tech lead, which means you know something about software, and your manager thinks you’re mature enough to be given greater responsibility for projects. Having the technical chops and maturity is nothing, however, if you can’t figure out the biggest trick of being a good tech lead: the willingness to step away from the code and figure out how to balance your technical commitments with the work the whole team needs. You have to stop relying entirely on your old skills and start to learn some new skills. You’re going to learn the art of balance.
From now on, wherever you go in your career, balancing is likely to be one of your core challenges. If you want to have autonomy over your work, if you want the freedom to make choices about what you work on when, you must gain mastery over your time and how you use it. What’s worse, you’ll often need to balance doing things you know how to do and enjoy doing, such as writing code, with things you don’t know how to do. It’s natural for humans to prefer activities they’ve mastered, so when you have to spend less time on your current talents in favor of learning new things, it’ll feel quite uncomfortable.
It can be hard to balance the work of project management and oversight with hands-on technical delivery. Some days you’re on a maker’s schedule, and some days you’re on a manager’s schedule. Through trial and error, you’ll need to learn how to manage your time to provide yourself with appropriately sized blocks to work in. The worst scheduling mistake is allowing yourself to get pulled randomly into meetings. It is very difficult to get into the groove of writing code if you’re interrupted every hour by a meeting.
Even with careful scheduling, you won’t often have the time to focus for several-day stretches on coding problems. Hopefully, you’ve learned some tricks before now to help you break down your own work so that you don’t need to spend multiple days of focused effort to finish technical tasks. You also know that it’s important to get your team into a schedule that allows them to be focused on development for long stretches of time, because they will need to focus for several days on coding problems. Part of your leadership is helping the other stakeholders, such as your boss and the product manager, respect the team’s focus and set up meeting calendars that are not overwhelming for individual contributors.