How to be an effective tech lead as team grows

How to do better as a tech lead and mentor multiple engineers at the same time to help them grow?

I would try to scale up what you were doing before with one eng to the whole team. There's great content on Taro about keeping a 1:1 doc to make sure that you and your mentees are held accountable for your action items. In every meeting, you should be thinking about the short-term deliverables and the long-term career goals for your mentee. The short-term deliverables are getting projects executed on time and getting them unblocked. The long-term planning is making sure they are working on projects at the next level. It can be easy to be short-sighted, and the next thing you know, 2 years have passed, and your mentee can still be operating at the same level because of poor project selection or decision making.

I'm delivering projects with good velocity and quality, but from my past experience I found it pretty hard to apply same standard to others, how should I change my mindset to help team move fast and improve quality instead of just being a good IC myself?

You'll need to be okay with taking a hit in your project delivery time. What gets you to E5 isn't necessarily what gets you to E6. It's not just doing what you were doing before, but faster. You may even run the risk of burning out if you try to do this plus mentor multiple engineers.

You may need to take on more exploratory projects where you are doing more investigation rather than coding. The exploratory work lets you delegate and plant seeds for projects that your mentees can work on.

I want to give new engineers (probably all E4s) chances to lead tech design. To what extent should I be helping with the designs? Should I delegate more and let them take full credit, or should I be handholding more?

I would make sure to set high expectations and assume that they can write good tech designs. Give them the ability to succeed by having a discussion about the project beforehand and give them examples of good pieces of tech specs. Then, let them take their best stab at it and make sure to leave comments for places where they didn't consider something or point out the edge cases that they missed.

When I'm leading projects, how to make sure I get my part of credit while other mobile engineers also get their credits? Also related to this, how to better separate tasks on a project? I want to make sure they have chance to grow while I also get chance to grow.

When you are writing your performance reviews, giving status updates in standups, offering advice in public communication channels, you'll indirectly get credit if your manager is paying attention. Make sure to mention how you spent your time during your 1:1s with your manager. People will know.

For task separation, it might help to start at the very high level of what you want to accomplish, then start breaking the higher level goal into more and more granular chunks of deliverables until you get tasks that take 1-4 hours to complete.

That's what these courses are for!

• Tech Lead Blueprint: Role, Skills, and Strategies
• How To Be An Effective Tech Lead

One thing to note is that your company seems much smaller, since you're the only mobile engineer. Most of the concepts will still apply, but you likely won't have as much process or examples to pull from compared to a TL from Google or Facebook.

I want to give new engineers (probably all E4s) chances to lead tech design. To what extent should I be helping with the designs?

This really depends on the person. I would have a conversation with them about their level of ambition (and comfort) with leading a project, and how much involvement they want from you.