[dlevine]

Agreed. I think that the advantage of a good tech lead is that they:

1) Make sure that the people working for them are happy and challenged

and

2) Remove any roadblocks required for developers to solve the problems that they are working on (I would say "write code", but I don't think that the ultimate measure of developer productivity is how much code they write).

I think that good tech leads should help to keep productivity growing mostly (almost?) linearly as the engineering team grows.

[fitpolar]

Isn’t that the role of the scrum master? I fail to see the value that another layer of management provides vs a good scrum master... and if the scrum master isn’t any good, train them to be.

I thought it was a well written article though, and the author’s company sounds like the best environment to be in with a tech lead.

[maxxxxx]

What you are describing also fits the description of a good manager. There is more to management than continuously asking "When is it done?" and the lines between tech lead and manager are very blurry.