I've found the key to being an effective tech lead is to look at the team as an extension of yourself. As a senior engineer there is only so much you can do. Given the right team, you can do much more. This requires you do the planning and specifications, and occasionally pick off the difficult task. However, you must balance your engineering time against the productivity of the team.
My number one goal as a lead is always for my team to come in and work without interruption. Everything they need to complete a task should be in the task management software. This is what I want as a dev, and so is what I aim to provide for my devs. This doesn't mean writing all the specs myself. Give the devs enough info to write their own tasks and review them before they start. This is manageable up to about 6 people. If you have a bigger team, then you need sub-leads to spread the load.
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I've found the key to being an effective tech lead is to look at the team as an extension of yourself. As a senior engineer there is only so much you can do. Given the right team, you can do much more. This requires you do the planning and specifications, and occasionally pick off the difficult task. However, you must balance your engineering time against the productivity of the team.
My number one goal as a lead is always for my team to come in and work without interruption. Everything they need to complete a task should be in the task management software. This is what I want as a dev, and so is what I aim to provide for my devs. This doesn't mean writing all the specs myself. Give the devs enough info to write their own tasks and review them before they start. This is manageable up to about 6 people. If you have a bigger team, then you need sub-leads to spread the load.
Or, to be glib, you now program programmers, and so code in the highest level programming language of all.