The Tech Lead's New Project Checklist

Gergely Orosz's checklist is a battle-tested guide for tech leads taking on new projects. Based on experience at Uber, Microsoft, and Skype, it ensures nothing critical falls through the cracks during project kickoff.

The checklist covers understanding the project: clarifying goals and success metrics, identifying stakeholders and their concerns, understanding constraints and dependencies, and documenting assumptions and risks.

Technical setup includes: choosing the tech stack and architecture, setting up development environment and CI/CD, establishing code review and quality standards, and planning for monitoring and observability.

Team and process aspects cover: defining roles and responsibilities, establishing communication channels and rituals, setting up project tracking and documentation, and creating escalation paths for blockers.

The checklist emphasizes often-forgotten items like planning for handoff from day one, considering non-functional requirements early, building relationships with dependencies, and setting up success metrics before coding begins. This systematic approach prevents the chaos that often plagues project starts.