Tech Lead Guide

What it is

This is the guide product, not the app. It is a written operating manual for people stepping into technical leadership for the first time or formalizing a lead role they already drifted into. It focuses on the parts that usually get learned the hard way: how to structure your first 30-60-90 days, what meetings and docs are worth institutionalizing, how to run 1:1s without them turning into vague status updates, when to use ADRs versus RFCs, how to write useful post-mortems, how to manage your manager and skip, how to lead a team that uses AI heavily, and how to balance delivery pressure with mentorship, planning, and technical direction.

Who it's for

• Senior engineers stepping into a lead role for the first time.
• Acting leads or unofficial leads who want to formalize the cadence.
• Engineering managers inheriting a team and trying to read it without breaking it.
• Founding engineers becoming the first manager at a small company.

What's inside — 13 chapters

The guide is organized as a sequenced operating manual you can read top-to-bottom your first week or jump into per-chapter when a specific situation comes up:

1. First 30 Days — listening, mapping, what not to decide in week one.
2. 1:1s, Coaching, and Expectations — the structure that turns 1:1s from status into signal.
3. The Weekly Operating System — the rituals that make a team's week legible.
4. Planning, Scope, and Roadmap Pressure — committing without overcommitting.
5. Architecture Reviews, ADRs, and Tech Debt — when each format earns its friction.
6. Code Review, Quality, and Engineering Standards — depth of review without bottlenecking.
7. Incidents, Reliability, and On-call Health — post-mortems, follow-through, and on-call sustainability.
8. Stakeholder Management and Executive Communication — readouts, status, and saying no.
9. Hiring, Performance, and Team Design — interviewing, calibration, and team shape.
10. Cross-team Collaboration and Org Navigation — peer leads, escalation paths, and the trust-building loop.
11. Metrics, Delegation, and Lead Sustainability — health metrics, delegation, and avoiding burnout.
12. Working with Your Manager and Skip — managing up, the operating contract, and the shadow contract.
13. Leading an AI-Augmented Team — team AI policy, hiring and calibration shifts, code review in an AI-heavy environment, and the lead's own AI usage.

What ships with it

• The full guide — 13 chapters, written tight, no filler. Available as MDX you can render anywhere and as a hosted read for buyers at Tech Lead Guide reader.
• 12 reusable templates — Notion-friendly markdown for 1:1 kickoff, recurring 1:1, growth conversation, ADR, RFC, sprint planning, quarterly planning, project review, post-mortem, on-call handoff, stakeholder readout, and 30-day readout.
• Decision trees — when to ADR vs RFC vs neither, when to write vs Slack vs schedule, when to escalate vs absorb.
• Case studies — annotated examples of real decisions and the operating consequence (anonymized).
• Lifetime updates — new chapters, refinements, and templates ship to existing buyers at no extra cost.

Format

The guide ships as structured MDX content rendered through the same widget system that powers the public sample on this store. That means inline diagrams, charts, callouts, do/avoid blocks, tradeoff matrices, decision trees, and dialogue blocks — not just walls of text. Templates ship as Notion-friendly markdown you can paste directly into your own workspace.

What you can preview for free

The public demo at Tech Lead Guide sample shows the first two chapters in full so you know exactly what the rest of the guide reads like before buying.