[jspiral]

Here's a lens I use to think about my job that might make sense to someone with an engineering background:

- I'm in charge of architecting and building the team. the team is a system, of people and processes

- the team has various functional and nonfunctional requirements which i product manage

- I surface how the team works in general to our stakeholders, and our team strategy mainly deals with adjusting our "interface" and performance

- I also surface our team's current plan and how we're tracking, to the appropriate stakeholders, to give them context if we want to adjust how the "system" works

- I don't do any tasks other than those that relate to the above

- I don't try to heroically post-process or supplement the machine's performance through my personal efforts unless it's just really high leverage in that situation. (would have to be live or die almost, otherwise not worth it in the long run). I spend my efforts on adjusting the characteristics of the machine.