When Your Impact Is No Longer Measured in Pull Requests
I recently came across a post about the transition from Senior Developer to Tech Lead, and it got me thinking about something I've been experiencing myself: how much your definition of productivity changes when you move into technical leadership. For most of my career as a developer, being productive was pretty easy to recognize. I could look back at my week and see the features I implemented,…
After transitioning from a Senior Developer to a Tech Lead, I've come to realize that my definition of productivity has changed. In my previous role, I could gauge productivity through features implemented, bugs fixed, pull requests opened, and technical problems solved. However, as a Tech Lead, these tangible outputs are no longer the sole indicators of success.
My day-to-day work now involves planning, product discussions, stakeholder meetings, 1:1s, releases, technical decisions, hiring, security concerns, cross-team dependencies, and more. This shift in focus has led to days where I don't write much code or even any code at all, which can feel strange after years as a developer. GitHub's commit and pull request system, which once served as a visible record of my work, now feels inadequate in capturing the value I bring to the team.
The challenge lies in adapting to this new reality and redefining productivity beyond the metrics of traditional development.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
