My team and I have been extremely lucky in hiring Joe, our excellent head of engineering, and an extremely strong set of engineering managers. Not to mention incredibly strong product and user experience management.
I think it’s pretty obvious that my approach wouldn’t work if I didn’t have this bench of talented managers, but because I do it affords me the luxury to spend time doing things that I love and which are also valuable to the company.
In general, I wrote this article because I think that the classical approach to engineering management isn’t the only path you need to take, and a lot depends on the team you work with (thankfully we have a team that complements each other really well).