[zedgerman]

[disclaimer: I haven’t been a people manager for too long, so take it with a grain of salt]

I block off some time each day to do ‘something technical’. Sometimes it’s making something pretty that was ugly before. Sometimes it’s learning a new tool my team is considering to pick up. Generally these are things that are important, but not urgent.

For larger projects, I often attend the design reviews. Sometimes I help on the designs, especially if it’s a new product altogether.

All managers on our team are also required to participate in the on-call rotation.

Between those three, I feel like I am still “in the trenches” enough to not forget what it’s like.

[cddotdotslash]

I help write unit tests for code my team is working on. It's fairly non-blocking (we won't slip a delivery date if I get pulled into something else for a few days) but still requires me to understand the code base and ask questions of the engineers.