Technical risk is anything that could derail delivery or break in production, unknowns, fragile dependencies, scaling limits, single points of failure. A TL's job is to surface risk early and shrink it deliberately, because risk is cheapest to address before you've built on top of it.
How to manage risk
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1. IDENTIFY — what could go wrong? (unknowns, deps, scale, security, people)
2. ASSESS — likelihood x impact. Focus on the high-high quadrant.
3. ATTACK the biggest unknowns FIRST — spike, prototype, load-test
4. MITIGATE — reduce likelihood or blast radius (redundancy, flags, fallbacks)
5. MONITOR — track known risks; have a plan if they materialize