Sooner or later, every technology organization faces a necessary evil: migrations. Maybe the old system is not scaling or the implementation is too brittle to adapt to a new feature. Maybe it’s not capable of interoperating with newer systems. Whatever the reason, the time will inevitably come to migrate part of your application from one implementation to another.

Years ago, a mentor of mine talked to me about the distinction between leadership (coping with change) and management (coping with complexity). A tech lead does a little bit of both: we have to come up with the vision for growing the technical systems that solve problems for our customers and shepherd the solution from concept to production. While all that’s going on, we need to guide, manage, and support the people on our team so that they can always be growing. For first-time TLs, this can be an intimidatingly wide spectrum of responsibility. I know it was for me.