The 4 Pillars Of Technical Leadership
The 4 Pillars Of Technical Leadership
A framework for engineering leaders to better understand their role.
One of the challenges with technical leadership and management is knowing where to focus your attention, which can be difficult without someone to guide you.
What should I be doing?
Me: Every day.
Frameworks can help us think more clearly about the most important aspects of the role.
Software Engineering leadership is built on four pillars: direction, people, execution, and systems.
Let’s talk about each of the four pillars.
Direction
An important part of any leader’s role is setting direction.
Direction is about clarifying what’s important and aligning the team around common goals so everyone pulls in the same direction. Without direction, teams operate aimlessly and struggle to stay focused and motivated. Worse, they work on things that make sense for the team in the short term but not for the business in the long term.
Your teams can’t succeed if they don’t know where they are going, what’s important, and why their work matters.
Activities in this category include defining a vision, creating a strategy, defining goals, clarifying priorities, and building roadmaps.
People
Leaders work through other people. This means that your performance directly results from the people you manage.
The job of the people manager is to grow and support people in their career journey by finding opportunities and coaching and mentoring them through difficult problems.
People need opportunities to do great work to grow, which can be achieved by delegating specific projects and goals and providing support and coaching.
Execution (Aka “Get Things Done”)
As a leader, you are measured on only one thing: your ability to deliver results and get things done. Engineering teams exist to provide value to customers, stakeholders, and the business.
As an engineering leader, your primary purpose is to ensure that your teams consistently and predictably execute and deliver value.
It is your main job.
Being conscious of “how are my teams doing?” and reviewing output is something to think about often.
Everyone wants to work in winning teams. Teams win by achieving results.
Execution is everything.
Systems
A non-obvious part of a leader’s job is to build and improve systems.
Systems are a collection of things that together achieve a goal.
Without systems, your business and team would be inefficient and in constant chaos. Systems enable you to consistently and predictably achieve outcomes.
Building and improving systems is a high-leverage activity because the quality of your systems usually has a bigger impact on your team’s efficiency and ability to deliver results than anything else.
Everything in your business relies on systems. The systems that exist in all software organisations include how you hire people (hiring system), deliver software (SDLC system), manage customer support issues (customer support system), and manage projects (project management system).
Part of your job as a leader is continually defining, measuring and improving these systems because they enable you to get things done at scale.
A system:
Achieves a purpose (e.g. deploy software to production, hire people)
Can have inputs and outputs (e.g. candidate CVs -> hiring system -> new hires)
Can contain a set of processes (e.g. how to deploy code to production)
Can be measured (e.g. cycle time, number of interviews conducted, number of candidates hired)
Can be continually improved
Systems are everywhere.
Create them. Measure them. Improve them.
Summary
Here’s a quick recap of the main pillars of technical leadership and how they map to common leadership activities.
Direction (vision, mission, strategy, goals, roadmap, priorities)
People (1:1s, mentoring, coaching, feedback, delegation, performance management
Execution (project management, reporting progress, meetings)
Systems (hiring, onboarding, software delivery, customer support, on-call)
Bonus: Reflection Questions
You can use questions as weekly prompts for each area:
Have I communicated strategy, goals, and priorities to the team? (Direction)
How could I better help grow and support the people in my team? (People)
Is the team executing well and consistently delivering? (Execution)
Which systems are working well, and which need to be improved? (Systems)
Thanks for reading.
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If you want to provide feedback or request content on a particular topic, email me at: owain@owainlewis.com.