I’m right at the cusp where I was a very strong individual contributor at my previous jobs, and have now been a team lead for about six months now. At first, I

I’m right at the cusp where I was a very strong individual contributor at my previous jobs, and have now been a team lead for about six months now. At first, I felt like I was wasting time spending a good portion of my day in meetings, but I’ve realized that the meetings are super important because I know what the business actually wants and can translate that into the technical documentation necessary to get our software engineers where they’re working efficiently. This way, the engineers on my team don’t have to ask a bunch of questions to the PO/team lead for clarification like they did before. It’s a huge win and our team has been lauded as becoming substantially more productive because of this design work, refining and grooming our tickets properly before the devs ever see them. From an individual contribution perspective I’ve written a few hundred lines of code since I started, unless you count me out putting code via some CLI tricks involving some templates (I don’t really, and am trying to teach the other engineers about powershell/bash use cases) but when I do step in it’s either because of some design pattern we want to nail to avoid future tech debt, or I’m fixing a bug that a junior or mid level dev has spent a dozen hours on and couldn’t figure out what went wrong. So the 20% or so of my time I’m actually spending doing IC work is to unblock the team, so it feels really high impact relative to the time I spend on it. So in short, my role has the added benefit of far fewer meetings for the other developers on the team, while also keeping someone technical in the loop to push back on unrealistic expectations from the business, getting to ask clarifying questions, and working closely with our POs to have everything teed up so the team can just show up to work and get down to the “important stuff”. I think it’s an important role with intangible benefits people can’t really see until they get a before/after comparison where everything else was largely the same.