One underrated skill I’ve learned as a tech lead: admitting when I was wrong, and learning forward.

When I was a tech lead at Telkom Indonesia, I had to make several infrastructure decisions for our analytics stack.

We started by storing our initial analytics data in Elasticsearch, which worked well at first. We had great Kibana dashboards up and running. But when it came to more complex data manipulation, we hit a wall, learning Elasticsearch’s DSL instead of just using SQL slowed us down significantly.

So I decided to switch to PostgreSQL. It gave us the SQL familiarity we wanted and boosted our developer experience. But… it didn’t scale. The amount of data we handled was simply too much for the instance, and performance started to suffer.

Eventually, we moved to Google BigQuery, and it turned out to be the right fit all along.

✅ SQL support

✅ Massive scalability

✅ Easy integration with Python (especially pandas)

✅ Smooth ETLs and manageable costs

Looking back, I wish I had chosen BigQuery from the start. I made decisions that caused unnecessary friction and rework, and I’m sincerely sorry to my team who had to navigate that with me.

But I also gained something more important: the humility to recognize poor decisions, the courage to course-correct, and the wisdom to make better calls in the future.

🎯 Why it matters: As a tech lead, your decisions impact not just systems. But your team’s energy, momentum, and trust. And how you respond when things go wrong says more than getting everything right the first time.

Would love to hear how others handle tough tech decisions and team impact, comment below or DM me anytime.