[l8rpeace]

I was an IC program manager. I was asked to manage program managers. I stepped back to become an IC within a year.

I did this because my team was immediately starved for engineering resources upon my appointment, I was asked to continue my IC product management responsibilities while managing the team, and I kept getting PMs that were the problem children of the group.

I went on to run product management for tooling and ops processes around that tooling in the post-manager PM role. I never looked back.

However, I got the bug so bad I left to start my own company, so now I manage everyone?

[jameshush]

You probably already know this, but in case anyone else hasn't had this experience, learn from my mistake and think of it as "so now I manage these 4-5 leaders" instead of "so now I manage everyone". I thought this was the same thing, but I learned the hard way there's a reason middle managers exist :)