[cloverich]

I like how Engineering Manager is defined in "The Managers Path" -- which is what you are describing. They shoud be someone who does an occassional bug fix to maintain a boots on the ground approach, but is spending 95% of their time on the items you listed. I think one issue w/ Managers is that we get manager's who should be at this technical level, but are instead so hands off (or fully non-technical) they can't even reason (or delegate) priorities when architecture or tech debt is involved. To be fair, I have worked with fully non technical managers who had a good understanding of how much time to allot towards architecture, refactoring, etc. But those are rare.