Congratulations, you're a tech lead! You're on your own. Now go do it!

The first time I was a tech lead, I felt excited and important to be officially recognized as the de facto expert on my team, but also nervous. I had never been responsible for other people's work before.

I thought my manager would prepare me in some way, maybe with some mentoring or training. But everyone was so busy that all I got was vague advice like “be the sh*t umbrella” or “communicate clearly with your team.”

I didn't know how to motivate people to do what I thought was important — and I would often end up just doing everything myself, working alone late into the night.

I didn't know how to effectively split my time between coding, reviewing code, coordinating the team, managing projects, and putting out fires — and so I just kept trying to juggle everything, all while feeling disappointed and frustrated at my low productivity.

I didn't even know what success looked like. My company still evaluated me on my technical contributions, so where did the health and happiness of the team fit in?

I struggled on my own, and the team suffered as a result.

We slipped on deadlines that we'd promised to execs or customers — or pulled late nights until 2am trying to hit them.

We built up more and more technical debt as we shipped features — and we'd feel the ongoing frustration of working with code that we knew could be cleaner, if only we could make time for refactoring efforts.

We littered the codebase with works-in-progress that never shipped — or found ourselves undoing work for changing requirements that I failed to nail down.

I felt like I was just barely keeping everything together with duct tape — that things would break down at any moment.

And sometimes they did.

We'd lose people on the team — as they burned out or gave up or decided that a team at another company would be a better place to work.

We'd spend months on features that failed to have the impact we wanted, valuable months that could've been spent on critical technical investments — resulting in low morale and motivation.

It took many years of trial and error, learning things the hard way, trying to do it all on my own, and then connecting and sharing stories with other tech leads around Silicon Valley before I finally realized a hard truth.

Sure, it's true that some lessons are best learned through experience.

But just a few foundational tools and high-leverage frameworks would've made a significant difference — I could've set myself up for success as a tech lead much earlier.

And now, my co-founder Jean Hsu and I are excited to share those tools and frameworks with you.

We've always known that we would design and run an experience specifically for tech leads. The tech lead role, as ambiguous and varied as it is, is near and dear to both of our hearts — or perhaps it's because the role is so ambiguous and varied.

It is one of the most impactful roles on engineering teams. It's the role that gets things done and delivers results. It's the role that turns a group of engineers into a team. It's the role that levels up junior engineers and raises the entire engineering team's capacity.

And yet, because engineers stepping into tech lead roles are almost always strong engineers, there's a misconception that they actually don't need as much support as they navigate an almost completely different role.

Engineers moving into tech lead roles often struggle to still live up to former expectations of delivering as a senior individual contributor, as they also take on mentoring and coordination. In reality, that transition is when support is most high-leverage.

That's because even though everyone's situation might be unique, the challenges faced by tech leads are quite similar:

You have all the responsibility and accountability, and none of the authority.

What if you had clarity and confidence around your tech lead role? What if you felt empowered to define what success looked like and had the tools to make that success a reality?

Imagine — you're at a project retrospective, and the team is beaming. People feel challenged and stretched but not burnt out, proud to ship high-quality work they could stand behind, happy to be part of a team with visible impact on the company.

The process, status updates, tracking, communication — everything felt just right. Not too light to be useful, and not overly cumbersome.

It wasn't easy at times, but you always knew that you could handle the changes and challenges that emerged. When product plans changed halfway into a sprint, you communicated clearly both upwards and to your team — and people trusted and respected you for how you handled those situations. When someone went down a rabbit hole, you swiftly steered them back on course — and people appreciated how kindly provided feedback and protected the team's time.

You guided the team to make smart technical decisions, constantly navigating healthy and sustainable tradeoffs between the short-term and long-term. You stepped gracefully between helping out with specific tasks and giving enough autonomy to your teammates so they felt trusted and empowered — it's clear to you that your real impact was being able to effectively align a team of engineers behind a shared goal.

You feel so good about how you led the team to deliver results.

In the company all-hands, your team is called out for its excellent execution, teamwork, cross-team collaboration, and impact.

But it's not just execution that you're proud of — you're also growing your team.

Junior engineers on the team thrive under your mentorship — they used to need hand-holding for small tasks, and now they are implementing larger chunks of work autonomously. More senior engineers appreciate your role as a sounding board when they're stuck, even when you don't have expertise in their areas. The product manager and designer appreciate your clear communication.

Your teammate even says to you,

“If you ever switch teams, I'll follow you.”

And for yourself, you're getting what you want out of your time as a tech lead — clarity for yourself on what's next for you in your engineering career. Maybe it's being an engineering manager or staff engineer or architect or CTO. You're taking this opportunity to explore what you enjoy and gain new skills for what's next.

This might seem inaccessible right now.

Maybe you've tried finding mentors — and perhaps you're lucky to have found one or two. You look at the people around you and try to emulate the people you admire, or just try to not make the same mistakes you see.

Maybe you've read a few books and blog posts, watched one-off TED talks and lectures on leadership, and listened to engineering leadership podcasts.

Maybe you have a small bag of tools that you're starting to practice.

But you're still wondering:

Am I doing a good job? When does this get easier?

And you don't know. It's hard to compare when your role and situation seem different from what you see around you.

There are so many new challenges and situations that arise, and you wish you had a blueprint to follow, to tell you, "This is how you do this. These are the things that you can try. This is what success means."

We've distilled the most foundational mindsets and actionable frameworks required to be an effective tech lead into a two-day leadership experience. These include powerful tools that apply whether you're at a small startup or a big company, whether you're an aspiring tech lead or a senior technical leader.

Most importantly, you'll learn to lead, even when you don't have authority.

Here are just a few things you'll learn from the experience:

The event is highly experiential. You'll watch live demos of tools and frameworks and observe their impact. You'll get hands-on practice and feedback in a highly supportive learning environment. And you'll get deep-dive discussions of how to apply the tools and skills in real-world scenarios — even nuanced ones you face in your own work.

You'll leave feeling empowered and confident that even if you're faced with a new situation, you'll have a set of tools to communicate effectively and drive towards clarity, alignment, and impact.