Part 1. The tech lead: Cultivating leadership

In your journey toward producing a greater impact in the world with DS, becoming a tech lead and driving project integrity is often the first step. You are discovering your personal limitations as an individual contributor: you can only write so many lines of code and analyze so much data in a day. For some, it can be hard to acknowledge our own finiteness as individual humans. The sooner we realize our own limitations, the more time we have to start practicing what has made human civilizations so powerful, which is our capability to organize and lead.

So what is the tech lead role? The tech lead role focuses on leadership and management in technology and projects. This is in contrast to the manager role, which focuses on people and team management.

To enter a tech lead role, the biggest challenge for an individual contributor is the practice of influence. You are expected to lead and mentor a team of data scientists, and work with business and engineering partners, often without any of them reporting to you.