Could you elaborate on how you made a tech tree for a development team/project? I'm struggling to imagine how that would look.

Sure, I'll do my best.

My team is designing a new product for our company. We know what we want the end result to be, but we have several iterations to make on our current product to get there, and each iteration can branch through several paths to satisfy our requirements.

So there's a hardware tree which lists the options we have to upgrade the hardware, a software tree that shows the scope of options we have to improve the software, etc.

The idea is to show the different tasks that need to be done; and which can be done concurrently and which need to be done sequentially to get to our goal.

I showed my team the Factorio tech tree to give them an idea, but I didn't realize people used them professionally.

Usually when joining a fairly technical team, the team has put together "learn these things" to get up to speed. For example, on our team where I am currently, you should be fairly familiar with statistics and maths after the first year on the team.

Okay, so it's just an onboarding-type list but with "dependencies" to structure them like a tree?

For us it's less about onboarding to the team and more of what tech do we need to develop for this product to meet client spec. I'm using it more as an organizational tool to structure which tasks need to be done sequentially (i.e. the API needs to be complete before we can test it with the software) and the tasks that can be done concurrently (i.e. the hardware can be developed and tested the same time as the software, up to a point).

I think you could use a gantt chart to accomplish the same thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart

And your comment about the dependencies is still accurate for my team since we have to be efficient about doing the concurrent parts together to make sure we get this product to our client on time.

It's been useful for me to visualize all the moving parts of my project and see options that I have in a way that is familiar to me.