Technical leaders who manage technical disagreements well intervene at the naming step, not the resolution step. They do not wait for the disagreement to escalate and then resolve it by authority. They intervene early, name the tradeoff both parties are optimising for, and ask whether the context makes one preference clearly more appropriate. This intervention is often sufficient — once the tradeoff is named, one engineer usually recognises that their preference is not appropriate for this context.
They also distinguish between disagreements about correctness and disagreements about preference in real time. Disagreements about correctness — where one party is factually wrong — should be resolved by evidence. Producing the evidence quickly, and requiring the incorrect party to update their position when the evidence is clear, is a cultural norm that prevents correctness disagreements from becoming multi-week debates.
The best technical leaders document the resolution, not just the outcome. The ADR that records the decision also records the tradeoff and the argument that was made for the alternative. The documentation does two things: it transmits the reasoning to engineers who were not in the room, and it specifies the conditions under which the decision should be revisited. Both outputs are more valuable than the decision itself.