I recently completed a complex (Agency) migration project. Initially, the project was framed as a small-scope effort, but once I began, I discovered significant gaps and unmapped dependencies with no clear owners due to recent organizational shifts.

The volume of gaps made it impossible to manage alongside my other responsibilities. When initial attempts to get support from my direct manager didn’t yield results and the risk of delay became critical, I made the decision to escalate to my skip-level manager. This move finally brought the necessary attention to the project, resulting in my manager and two L6 engineers being assigned to prioritize and finish the work.

Key Learnings

Watching how senior leaders stepped in provided a masterclass in high-stakes project management. Here are the lessons I’ve taken away:

1. The Necessity of Escalation

One of the biggest lessons was realizing that escalation is a tool, not a failure. When there is a high risk of project delay that cannot be resolved at your current level, you have a responsibility to surface it. Staying silent while a project fails is much worse than the temporary discomfort of escalating.

2. Maximize “Legal” Channels

While skip-level escalation was necessary here, I learned that communication should happen through established “legal” channels as much as possible to avoid surprises. The weekly report I maintain is my most powerful official channel—I realized I need to use it to flag risks more clearly and frequently before they require a direct skip-level intervention.

3. Earn Your Seat at the Table

If you aren’t being given the space to speak or provide input, don’t wait for an invitation. Find the chance to speak. Once you start providing valuable insights or identifying critical risks, you’ll find that people not only start listening but will actively invite you to the decision-making meetings.

4. Formalize the Chaos

Visibility is the first step toward resolution.

• Create Bugs: Don’t just talk about problems; file bugs for every important issue.
• Write it Down: Create concise documents that outline the gaps and their impact.
• Share Widely: When problems are documented and shared, they become visible to everyone, making it much easier for leadership to prioritize them.

5. Use Process as a Tool

When a project is at risk, communication needs a dedicated rhythm.

• Leverage TPMs: Work with Technical Program Managers to bring structure to the communication.
• Dedicated Syncs: Schedule specific meetings or use calendar placeholders to ensure the situation is communicated clearly to all stakeholders. Don’t assume everyone understands the risk—make it undeniable.

Communicate Up

While my written communication is good, it still needs improvement, and there is a clear need to address the gap in vocal communication and the consistency of updates.

• Improve Vocal Communication:
  • Focus on better organizing thoughts before speaking.
  • Ensure I am explaining my thoughts and the reasoning behind them clearly.
• Keep People Informed:
  • Maintain frequent touch points to ensure leadership is always updated.
  • For complex discussions, rely on written documents to ensure clarity, even when the discussion is only with a direct lead.
• Strategic Reporting:
  • Prepare more formally when presenting to senior leaders.
  • Be intentional about deciding when and how quickly to surface information.
• Pushing Through: Sometimes direct leads may prevent problems from being reported upward. In these situations, I need to push to ensure issues are surfaced correctly.

Manage Down

Managing the team effectively requires a balance of motivation and healthy pressure.

• Motivate and Push:
  • Focus on keeping the team motivated while pushing for results.
  • Use urgency when needed—reminding the team that “we will miss the bus!” if we don’t maintain momentum.
• The Need to Challenge:
  • It is easy to be “nice,” but effective management requires the ability to Challenge Directly, a core principle from the book Radical Candor.
  • By avoiding “ruinous empathy” (where being nice prevents honest feedback), I can better challenge the team’s performance and ideas to drive the project forward.

I want to record this textbook case.

Our partner team is not responsive as they are busy. They don’t have time to response to our request to collaborate, but we need to get things done. I will use XX to represent the tech.

They are the general XX team, while we are the vertical team that want to introduce XX into our product. We have to build XX as it is the highest priority.

What can we do? My manager asked me to start the work without their help but try the best to come up with a solid design. Then we share the design out, if they don’t response, we will implement the way we designed without them.

They have to response, and marked us ask a significant collaborator.

Now, they propose a different opinion trying to block us. What they said makes sense still, and we also have the design option just don’t have the resource to implement.

However, this option requires a horizontal support from them but they didn’t build the horizontal infra yet. Our priority is not on the top, what to do?

They don’t response so we include Director into the discussion (“If you include director, they will response” – from my TL). But just limited to several messages.

We have to meet them, but again they refuse to meet. “Can we schedule meeting?” “A meeting will be really helpful to clarify”

Now comes another trick, we just schedule a meeting, and mark our director as optional. And they joined, and we discussed our reasons.

How the project develops? Let’s see.

Today I got some advice from a Director and my skip on leading project.

1. Learn how to present the project progress. Not something like “oh… we can’t do this, we can’t do that, we have difficulty in blabla”, but something like “in this amount of time, we can do X, and we plan to do Y as follow up effort, we also explored Z”

2. Similar as above, learn to negotiate. Not directly accept or directly reject, but something like I think we can do this …

3. Build 1:1 relationship with stakeholders for each important project. E.g. in this project, you should connect 1:1 with senior staff

4. Increase visibality

Thoughts

• Let’s improve the project communication, especially the progress of the project… Similar to what A (whole project TL) has done, let’s announce the progress, not just the issues or questions.

Today I got some advice from a L7 and my former mentor.

• Sustainable: find your work patten where you can deliver and also make sure it is sustainable. Do not frequently burn out.

• Do not act as firefighter, find the long term goal for your team, or yourself. Josh didn’t do well in the above two, not sustainable and break his health; also constantly be a firefighter instead of thinking about building the team, relying on others and instead spend more time thinking about the long term goal.

• Be proactive and have ownership. For low level, you can negotiate with the TL and manager to try to own something, design and propose. Now it is much easier to onboard yourself, youtube, bilibili, viber code.

• Be vocal. Speak during meetings.

Spend one week on a design that looks good, and start with prototyping in several weeks. Communicate with leaders.

Thoughts

• let’s try these advice and see

• let’s don’t run away from the bay area and the elite team and try to learn as much as possible if you can.

Seabirds dotted the water—some circling, others plunge-diving for fish. It felt like an all-you-can-eat ocean buffet.

According to ChatGPT, it was probably a humpback, feeding on sardines.

I love this scenery. The ocean abides - it’s there whether we show up or not, whether it crosses our mind or not.

(Modified by GPT5 Thinking)

What does a tech lead job covers?

Some learnings when I watch a L6:

• Think though to make sure the project can work E2E
• If there is a component missing, find resources. For instance, if the frontend/UI is missing, or if the backend is missing, I should talk to team who is willing to commit to work on frontend or backend. I should also monitor to see if they really do what they promised.
• For a new project, create a quick demo in a short time. This can create momentum for the project. Sometimes it’s faster to achieve something if people are forced to do this in a short time. And you should make sure this is in a short time.

I consider myself as tech lead for backend in this specific project. What should a tech lead do?

• Drive major designs
• Review designs
• Review code
• Drive meetings, track progress
• Contribute ideas for model quality improvement, join discussions