The key is to stay hands-on. I go for the tech lead role. Actually at my current company I'm co-lead of a team of 10 people. I've been CTO and also the sole te

The key is to stay hands-on. I go for the tech lead role. Actually at my current company I'm co-lead of a team of 10 people. I've been CTO and also the sole team lead in the past but I was always hands-on coding. I'm glad I have a co-lead at my current company; in fact, I'm the one who recommended to the big boss that he promote both of us. Normally, I'm the sole leader but in this company, we deal with corporate clients and so there is a fair amount of compliance work, team coordination and stakeholder management and also the project itself is very complex on the tech side. AI adds a lot of complexity. My co-lead is really good with coordination, planning, meetings, stakeholder management and alignment but at the same time he has less experience on the tech side so I have the last say on technical matters like architecture and choice of technologies and I'm in charge of general-purpose modules, configurations, migrations, data management... I think staying hands-on is very important, especially now with LLMs. Managing complexity is itself a separate concern from managing people. There is a human/psychological component to managing complexity but it's different than pure time management and coordinating work based on priorities. On a project with 10+ people, with AI, the complexity can grow rapidly and so it needs to be managed.