Let’s state the obvious: the ability to consistently grow engineers into senior roles is invaluable for any organization. It fosters better company culture, retains talent for longer, and helps reduce the unbearable headache of hiring in a hyper-competitive market. As we all know though, consistently growing engineers into seniors is hard—both for the managers and for the people they manage.

As a tech lead, you often simply don’t have the tools to help your team members grow. Overseeing them from task to task, from sprint to sprint, simply won’t cut it. To help them make the jump, you have to be much more deliberate with how you assign responsibilities over time and measure your team members’ professional growth.

As an engineer, unless you’re extraordinarily driven, you can’t ever be sure exactly what you have to accomplish and learn before you can turn into a leader or a senior individual contributor.

Too often, talented team members fail to get promoted when they’re ready, while their peers become senior in name only without having the right skills. And the whole process is so obscure, it’s difficult to even learn anything from failure.

In this session, we’ll try to chart a clear growth path, both for tech leads and for individuals, using a framework that helped grow numerous senior engineers.