Tech Lead to Principal: What actually changed

For me Principal isn’t just a bigger tech lead, it’s different accountability.

I got the role I wanted back in March 2025. Then I had to figure out what I’d actually signed up for.

This post goes through the journey I’ve been on, highlighting the biggest changes to my role, what I think I’m getting right, and what I’m still figuring out. Partly as a post I wish I could give myself over a year ago, or even before when I decided it was the role I wanted to strive for.

The biggest changes

The smaller room

Soon you’ll sit in a room (hopefully) with people much smarter than you, with a wealth of different experiences and opinions you can learn from. They will represent the entire organization’s technical leadership, and that room will be a lot smaller than you expect.

Yet here you are, sat at the same table.

This table is nerve-wracking for much longer than you expect. With time you’ll stop second-guessing every comment or answer to each question, and stop being concerned with how the others perceive your answers.

The stakes are much higher now than they ever have been; leave your pride at the door and get the job done right. Don’t be afraid to ask, challenge, or disagree. You’re at the table because you deserve it. It’s now your responsibility to leverage that position.

They let you in this “exclusive” room, act like you belong in it. You’re already responsible for the outcomes.

No party for every land mine you miss

The consequences are very delayed. You’ll make a decision and not feel its impact for good or bad for a long time. This takes some getting used to.

You need to reprogram, crushing tickets is a party trick, strategic value and impact is now your objective.

You’ll be part of the team steering your group through challenging territory. There will be no party for every land mine you miss. The celebrations are few and far between, and even then you might not think you deserve them.

You’ll need to get more strategic in your thinking, looking past the immediate issues, into the systemic ones that threaten your goals and tackle them before you can even see them clearly.

You might nail a solution, deliver something impactful, early and exceeding expectations, but that is kind of the job. The dopamine has moved.

Needing an opinion on everything

You often need to have an opinion on more than you want. It doesn’t fly when you’re indifferent about some topic or decision. It’s now your job to offer something. Also being right doesn’t matter, but affecting change in the right direction even just a little bit is beneficial. You have a technical voice people listen to at this level. Use it.

Cold starts

Occasionally you’ll be gifted a problem or project with little to no handover and become the immediate owner. Assumptions made, communications sent, and now you’ll be the one pulling the brakes and needing to deliver bad news. This is the job. Damage control is needed and never glamorous.

What helped me

Write it down

The problem spaces and their possible solutions at this level typically exceed your brain space. Don’t just try and remember it all. Start writing it all down.

I mean it. Don’t use Gemini notes or whatever. Write it down. Yourself. For every ask I receive I typically start a public (mostly) document in our Confluence space. Write some basic context and information and keep it in my TODO area.

One-way vs two-way doors

Not all decisions are the same. Some are easy or cheap to undo. For those make a decision, measure and move on.

Others, however, are expensive or difficult to undo, for those spend the time to educate yourself and learn the invariants and details. It will save you in the long run.

Scratch the itch (sparingly)

You’ll miss writing code. So do it occasionally. I still find myself opening little side quests, some small niche deliverable to scratch an itch. But I’m trying to ensure it is at least related to a larger and important deliverable. If not, it is pure distraction. As soon as you notice yourself burning daylight solving a problem no one has, you need to reassess and get back out of your comfort zone.

What I’m still figuring out

I still feel like I don’t belong, I procrastinate on silly little tech lead habits, sometimes I don’t think strategically enough.

The ways of working that got me here don’t work anymore. Now the job is different. It’s less about correctness at the point of output, more about shaping correctness across the system.

But by far the biggest thing I have yet to overcome is over-indexing on certainty. I’ve recently realized I wasn’t afraid of being wrong. I was afraid of being evaluated by people whose judgment I trust. So I delayed the very conversations that would calibrate my judgment faster.

I didn’t notice for far too long, and it’s a hard habit to break. It requires being visible during the thinking, not after it. As tech lead I was optimizing for being correct in private, now I need to be useful in public.

Me being self-critical, who would have thought it would be this hard…

Closing

In the end I got everything I ever asked for, and most of what I wanted.

Do I know what this job means yet? Not really.

Will I still try to do it better than I did yesterday?

Absolutely.