Managing projects

Doesn't agile software development get rid of the need for project management? No. Agile software development is a great way to think about work because it forces you to focus on breaking tasks down into smaller chuncks, planning those smaller chuncks out, and delivering value incrementally instead of all at once. None of this means that you don't need to understand how to do project management. You'll have projects that for whatever reason can't be completed in a single sprint, or even two small sprints. You'll need to estimate project length for your management team, and give some detail on why you believe things will take that long. There are some projects, usually described by words like infrastructure, platform, or system, that require architecture or significant advanced planning. When faced with this kind of project, which includes many unknowns and relatively hard deadlines, you will find it doesn't fit so well into the standard agile process.

Project management isn't something that needs to happen in detail for every single effort, and it's overused in some organizations. I don't even like hiring project managers because they often act as a crutch for engineers to use instead of learning to think through their future work and ask real questions about what they're doing and why, and their presence means that you have more waterfall-style projects instead of an agile process. Still, project management has to happen, and as tech lead, you should be doing it when it is needed, especially for deeply technical projects.

Ultimately, the value of planning isn't that you execute the plan perfectly, that you catch every detail beforehand, or that you predict the future; it's that you enforce the self-discipline to think about project in some depth before diving in and seeing what happens. A degree of forethought, in places where you can reasonably make predictions and plans, is the goal. The plan itself, however accurate it turns out, is less important than spending time on the act of planning.

Camille Fournier, "Tech Lead", in The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change, chapter 3.