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About the author
Falko Burghausen has more than a dozen years of experience as a hands-on software engineer and technical leader in the tech industry. He knows both the startup world and corporate business and, as a long-time CTO at a Swiss healthtech company, brings extensive know-how in the areas of leadership and management as well as the setup and scaling of complex software systems and the teams behind them.
Sports and photography provide the necessary balance and distance to the tech world and play an important and inspiring role for him in everyday life.
What is Technical Leadership?
As software engineers or technical leaders, we work in a diverse, interdisciplinary environment between complex and networked systems, with people from a wide variety of backgrounds and roles, and with continuously evolving business models. This versatility requires approaches and working methods that go far beyond bits and bytes and continuously incorporate technical, social, economic and ecological aspects.
The definition of technical leadership ranges from taking on technical responsibility in a sub-project (often associated with the role of lead developer) to working as a CTO in large corporations with corresponding personnel responsibility. The areas of responsibility are enormously varied and exciting, and move dynamically between technology and product strategy, psychology and leadership, and within the company’s entire tech stack.
However, technical leadership is also the assumption of responsibility at a technical level, for example, by a software engineer ensuring a continuously high level of code quality in his own code and that of his development peers. Technical leadership is not linked to roles or titles. It is often an unnoticed process within an engineering team when employees independently take on responsibility and commit themselves to a cause that is important to them because of their experience or that is close to their hearts.
For (Senior) Software Engineers, Tech Leads and Engineering Managers.
Our articles are aimed at interested employees of startups and large companies who want to develop in their role as a software engineer, tech lead or engineering manager and aspire to a way of working that goes beyond purely technical tech know-how or line management.
The focus of our articles is clearly on lean principles, on agile methods as well as on highly automated, scalable software systems and interdisciplinary teams.