As a tech lead, you&#x27;re a mixture of manager and lead engineer.<p>As a manager, you should be clear to represent your team in public in terms of giving everyone credit for success and taking personal responsibility for failure yourself.<p>As a manager, you need to balance what technical work you assign yourself - it should be a mixture of interesting projects and valuable scutwork.  Don&#x27;t be the guy who takes all the good work for himself and only delegates work no one wants.<p>As a lead engineer, the most valuable thing you can do for your team is to focus on helping them start things and finish things.  Folks do well in the middle between those two, but most of the wasted time and frustration comes from not knowing how to begin working productively on things or getting lost and not knowing how to wrap them up successfully.<p>As an architect, be able to quickly change altitude when explaining the behavior of the system or code that you&#x27;re responsible for.  When debugging an issue with a developer, be able to dive deep into the technical details.  When explaining a schedule or cost estimate, be able to talk about the system at a high level to the CEO.