[matt_kantor]

That sounds like a project manager to me. I'm curious if you have anyone with that job title (and if so what they do) or if your "team lead" is acting as a de facto project manager to fill a void.

If you don't have a dedicated project manager (which I suspect is the case), I'm also curious if you think your team lead is overworked. Maybe your team doesn't need full-time project management so it's more efficient to have this person split their energy between that and engineering, or maybe not and you'd be better off having someone who can specialize in that role.

[brandall10]

Yes, there was a dedicated PM - she was essentially at the top of the food chain, running the steering committee meetings (both the core team and individual feature teams) and coordinating the effort with all the team leads/managers (hardware, software, QA, product release engineering, regulatory, source control management, requirements engineering, and technical documentation). As I stated, there some 30+ people involved in the project. So the team leads/managers would at times do PM-like activities, more or less working hand-in-hand with the PM to get things through the system, organized, scheduled, signed-off etc.

BTW, I imagine you're mostly keying off the comment "He was the one who cleared pathways with other teams/resources (ie. ensured QA was on target to line up an availability window, how many engineers they could provide, etc)." That isn't an entirely true statement -- the PM would be the one to get this set in stone and pull rank if needed, esp. working with PMs for other projects or upper management. But as a team lead myself on another (albeit smaller) project, for instance, I would constantly be moving around the company talking with the other leads/managers to do exploratory work on where people were at even before the core team kicked off, building bridges so to speak. And between the core team meetings the unexpected would happen. Sometimes that would be a discussion with other leads, sometimes it would make more sense to bring it up with the PM, but generally speaking her plate was pretty full so I would take as much off of it as I could.

The team lead wasn't in particular overworked, he just spent the majority of his time in management type activities, perhaps about 1/3 of his time actually designing/coding/creating documentation.

[foota]

my former workplace would call this a scrum master (of course we were doing scrum not waterfall) perhaps dam engineer for waterfall?