[blahbhthrow3748]

7 direct reports actually seems fine if this person's role is primarily management. If they're also doing some combination of tech lead/product stuff they may want fewer reports to free up time for non-management activity.

Delegating some subset of direct reports seems less like it's about product or technical direction and more about aggregating and filtering management concerns. Presumably the whole team still works on the same thing and plans their work together, it's just that you do half the 1:1s, deal with what you can, and kick things up the chain if you can't.

[yeswecatan]

I guess I'm jut having difficulty defining what my team does vs. others that are on the same larger team. There's also a weird extra level on the org chart where ICs on my team and ICs on the head of the team are on different levels on paper.