Are you a tech leader balancing people management with technical depth?
In a Leadership Lessons episode, engineering leader and coach Anemari Fiser shared an insight that catches many engineering managers off guard: You don’t need to be the most technical person in the room to be effective.
In fact, believing you must be – having all the answers, jumping in first, staying hands-on with everything – is often what burns leaders out and blocks their teams from growing.
Which leads to the real question: If you’re not coding all day… how do you stay technical? Below, we break down the key insights from the episode.
How technical should a software engineering leader stay?
If you became a tech lead, it wasn’t random.
You moved from junior to senior engineer because your technical credibility was strong. You shipped. You debugged. You designed systems people trusted.
The mistake many new tech leads make is assuming they must continue being the strongest coder in the room and lead the team.
How technical you stay depends on who you’re leading. Understanding your team dynamic is the first step and adapting to it is the ongoing work.
If you’re managing senior engineers
If you manage a team of seniors, adding another strong technical opinion often doesn’t increase value. In many cases, facilitation and strategic clarity are more useful.
Your technical role shifts to:
- Validating direction
- Stress-testing design decisions
- Identifying system-wide risks
- Ensuring alignment with business goals
If you’re managing less experienced engineers
If the team lacks experience, you may need to be more hands-on but still in a coaching capacity.
That can mean:
- Reviewing code more closely
- Pairing on complex problems
- Explaining trade-offs explicitly
- Modeling how to approach design decisions
The goal isn’t to take over implementation, it’s to raise the team’s capability so your level of involvement can decrease over time.
All-in-all, as a tech leader, you don’t land on a perfect split between coding and leadership and stay there. There is no clean 60/40. You constantly adapt to your team (seniors vs juniors), the problem (production outage vs new product) and the company context (startup vs enterprise).
And how you show up day to day doesn’t mean you’re stuck in a codebase.
How do tech leads stay technical without coding every day?
Tech leads stay technical by seeing the system from a higher altitude. Your impact moves from what you can personally build to how much technical clarity, direction, and capability they can create across the team.
According to Anemari, it shows up in moments like these:
1. Breaking down messy, complex problems for the team
When a vague roadmap item or half-formed request lands, you don’t jump straight into implementation. You slow it down and clarify what’s actually being asked.
What problem are we solving? What constraints matter – timeline, scale, dependencies? What does success look like? What risks are already visible?
2. Deciding how to balance tech debt vs delivery
Every team faces the same tension: ship fast, or fix what keeps breaking. Staying technical as a tech lead means you understand the real cost behind both options. You know what that messy module is actually costing in maintenance time.
You see the operational risk of postponing refactoring. And you understand the business impact of delaying delivery. Your role is to make those trade-offs explicit.
3. Mentoring others to think through design decisions
As a tech lead, you don’t need to dictate every architectural choice. Staying technical means shaping how your team thinks. Instead of saying, “Do it this way,” you ask the questions that expose weaknesses and sharpen decisions. How will this behave under load? What happens if this dependency fails? How hard will this be to change in six months? What’s the rollback plan?
You’re not solving the problem for them. You’re improving the quality of the solution. Over time, engineers start anticipating those questions. They bring better proposals. They surface trade-offs upfront. They think beyond the happy path.
4. Translating technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
Staying technical as a tech lead also means representing engineering clearly outside the team. You understand the architecture well enough to explain why a “small change” isn’t small.
Maybe it touches multiple services. Maybe it requires schema changes. Maybe it increases long-term maintenance risk. Your job isn’t to defend the team emotionally. It’s to explain impact in business terms.
Instead of saying, “That’s complicated,” you say: “This affects three services and requires database changes. It will take five days, not one.”
Instead of saying, “We shouldn’t rush this,” you say: “If we skip testing, we increase the risk of production incidents and customer-facing downtime.”
You translate complexity into risk, cost, timeline, and impact.
Want to get the full picture?
Watch the Leadership Lessons episode with Anemari Fiser – now on demand.