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Be technically adept yourself

• You can’t teach someone something you don’t know
• Be very comfortable developing a complete full stack application by yourself
• Know how to learn
• You can (and should) trust your teammates to figure out how to make something you don’t know yourself, but you shouldn’t have to depend on them
• Have a very good grasp on what good/bad code is, why something is good/bad, and fundamental software design principles and their tradeoffs

Engineering design

• Technical Architecture
  • System design/DB schema/API structure/Integration with frontend
  • Ideally your entire team will be involved with this as you facilitate the process, but the tech lead is ultimately responsible
• Project Implementation Scoping
  • Understand the limitations of your team’s capabilities and your project’s development timeline
  • Given an example product, you should be able to understand fundamentally how it works, be able to dissect and analyze the implementation details, and have a rough idea on what tools you will need
  • Plan how to break down tasks
• Keep the project’s future in mind (sustainable, scalable, customizable, etc.)
• Deciding on yourTech Stack

Team growth

• Code Reviews
  • Perhaps the best source of growth for team members
  • Be very strict, while also accounting for time and development priorities
• Pair programming (especially to help devs with less experience)
  • Let team members drive

Code!

• Setup boilerplate/app structure/etc.
  • A team member can do these things if they want to learn, but their responsibility/priority should be to design and develop features that they can “own”
• High level glue
  • Help team members integrate their features with the rest of the app