You can go diagonally too - that's how I ended up in Enterprise Architecture. It puts you at a strategic level in your organization and directly working with VPs to uncover what the actual business problems are and how new and emerging technology might be used to solve those problems. Then you lead projects to actually solve those problems. No, you don't spend a lot of time writing code, but you
do get to spend some time writing code, and it's usually the most fun and interesting bits.
It's been working for me for 20 years now, and that's after spending 20 years as a developer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
