[stocktech]

I'm at a tech company as an EM. My primary responsibility is making sure my team is delivering high quality software. Sometimes this means my job is documentation, testing, being a PO/PM, or recruiter. I have to know the codebase to communicate and organize things, but I rarely have time to code. My days are spent in meetings and when I'm not in a meeting, I'm writing slack messages to other managers/teams or analyzing problems.

As a manager, you have the freedom to set your own schedule and run your team the way you see fit. I don't know if I'd recommend that when you first start out, but you're judged based on the outcome - generally. Some managers still do 50% coding, which is fine, but I think those pitfalls need to be considered carefully.

Once my teams get to a self-sufficient status, we're able to take on more responsibility and do more "innovation" type projects. That's "success" in my mind, but it takes time to get there. Up until that point, I do whatever I need to.

[tcgv]

> Sometimes this means my job is documentation, testing, being a PO/PM, or recruiter

Interesting. Do you also manage a PO in your team? And if so, when you need to act as a PO, how do you interact with him/her?

[stocktech]

No, eng and product are separate orgs, but I'll work with them on process, documentation, meetings, etc. I'm a big believer in demonstrating value before asking people to do more work. So when I wanted product to do write more documentation, I did most of it myself to show the impact it had on engineering and how organized the team was. Now product owns it.

It's less about taking on roles and just doing what needs to be done. Everything is a partnership in building the product, so I help where I'm needed most. When our hiring pipeline dried up, I'm the one doing outreach. When our test suite needed enhancements, I'm writing demo code to show best practices. When an upstream service pushed breaking changes, I'm the one pushing for process/communication changes.

Granted, my current org is a little bit of a mess, but every place I've worked at needed me to flex because it gives my team the ability to do what they do best - code. And since I'm fixing processes and not a bottleneck, I have a stronger case for promotion too.

[tcgv]

Thanks for the clarification