From Building Software to Defining Purpose: A Tech Lead Reflection
From Building Software to Defining Purpose: A Tech Lead Reflection Today, as a tech lead, I joined a leadership training that unexpectedly shifted how I think about teams, ownership, and impact. We didn’t talk about frameworks, architecture diagrams, or performance tuning. Instead, we focused on something much more fundamental: Learning to Ask “Why” As engineers, we are trained to ask how : How do we implement this? How do we optimize it? How do we fix it? But leadership starts with a different question: Why does this team exist? Without a clear “why,” teams drift. Work becomes reactive. Decisions feel disconnected. The Single Statement Framework The training introduced a simple but powerful way to define a team’s purpose using one sentence: To <ACTION> for <PEOPLE> so that <IMPACT>. This structure forces clarity. Action — What do we actively do? People — Who do we serve? Impact — What meaningful change do we create...