TL Tales: Being Bold (and the GGN)
tech Tech · TL · GGN · Network · OpenConfig
I speak to quite a few folks who are navigating becoming a tech lead (or staff+ engineer, or whatever title your org uses). One question they often ask is, “How did you know to do X?” This question always makes me laugh.
The reality is: your senior technical leads don’t know that their idea, project, or programme is going to work out. They (we?) rely on:
- Trusting gut feel — Through experience, you build intuition. You learn to trust it, fact-check it, and back ideas that “feel right.”
- Being brave — You have to decide to take action and say, “Even though I don’t know exactly how we’ll do this yet, it’s where we need to go, so let’s get there.”
- Measuring progress and admitting when you’re wrong — You can’t blindly trust your gut. You have to check in regularly, recognise when an assumption was wrong, and adjust. Stop, iterate, pivot, or double down depending on what the data shows.
- Having (or faking) deep self-belief — You can’t fold the first time someone says something can’t be done. Be resolute about the target destination while remaining adaptable on the tactical route. Sometimes you have full confidence to drive delivery; other times, holding a firm direction is simply what the team needs to cut through ambiguity. Wishy-washy directions never get delivered.
If you’re aiming for a TL role or expanding your impact within one, reflect on how you can leverage these principles to push through ambiguous projects.
There’s truly no better time to be a TL. Modern AI tools have dramatically lowered the cost of prototyping, making a “show, don’t tell” approach easier than ever. Instead of debating theory in design docs for weeks, you can build a working prototype overnight to demonstrate what’s possible. To drive change, the key is simply to be bold. Choose to transform, disrupt, or improve something, and then just go do it. Even if you don’t know how you’ll get from A to Z, if you can map A to B, then B to C, then C to D, before you know it, you’ll be at Z.
A recent example for me: I lived this exact dynamic over the last 5 years working on the systems described in our SIGCOMM paper, GGN: Experiences in Designing and Deploying the Next-Generation Google Global Network. I co-authored the original internal proposal that kicked off this work, and the WAN Building Block detailed in the paper was my core focus as an Uber Tech Lead.
When we started on GGN and WBB, plenty of people didn’t believe it could be done. But we backed the vision, stayed bold through the ambiguity, and delivered it on a planet-scale WAN. Mo Al-Fares did a great job of explaining the work of many Googlers, and I’m both glad we could share it and proud of what we’ve delivered.