> I followed my mentor’s advice and started to check-in at least every half day with each pair of engineers I was working with
Uuuuhhh...
If a PM did that with me when I have a lot of work to do it'd send me off the rails.
This article seems more to be about "what I have done as a non-technical PM to reduce my own anxiety at the detriment of my team".
It's hard to say without a lot of detail, but I think there's something disfunctional about the team or about how the project is structured in this example. How big are the tickets? It's common for a "user story" to take days or weeks; it can say something simple like "user can submit a form" but have a lot of big system dependencies that were not well thought out (a form system, a state system, a server component, etc).
Instead, tasks must follow a technical logic (a form system first, state management after, etc) and engineers should be left to do their own thing, with minimal "checking". Something like BaseCamp's "Shape Up" [1] comes into mind, with a few bets every cycle.