Sometime into Yonder I discovered that there was a name for the role I was playing.
There's the typical Manager, mainly focused on people management, and there's the Individual Contributor (IC), mainly focused on writing code.
Then I learnt that there's the Tech Lead Manager that sits in the intersection.
Christoph Nakazawa, who while at Meta was the creator of Jest, and was previously part of the React Native core team (tools and technologies I use everyday), wrote a great post this in Mastering Tech Lead Management.
At Yonder I'm principally in charge of all things mobile app and web. That meant writing a lot of code and figuring out how to make a better app for everyday spending than Monzo or Revolut. In addition, I also lead hiring for the engineers that join the team. I actively help and mentor frontend engineers learning the more difficult parts of React Native. Doing mentorship and sharing knowledge enables to move from an "I" to a "We", engineers can now contribute to planning across teams crucially aiding the technical difficulty/scope of projects. I also encourage the team to demo how to leverage new or existing technologies so that we can better plan and prioritise our roadmap.
As we've got bigger I've been transitioning from contributing product ideas: "we should do X"; into contributing strategic planning: "we have this goal, this problem in the way of it, and a bunch of different solutions that have differing levels of effort, required resources and risks". I have a bunch of resources that I've found helpful for ICs sharing strategy as it's easy to focus on the "how" we'd do something vs "why" we'd do something.
In the future we will see less specialisation and more overlapping skill in software Product/Design/Engineering, and the value in knowing which skill to apply at the right time will be increasingly valuable. I was joking with a friend on a walk late at night, it's a strange turn of events that the management skills you might learn in an MBA will be more useful than knowledge itself - skills in being a "Manager of Busy Agents" might be the future.
