Here’s some good food for thought on the engineer/manager decision, [0] and [1]. Good luck!

[0] https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...

[1] https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pe...

Code review, respect from engineers, directly feeling the pain points in our development process, I can commit small features strategically (like if a partner team isn't getting a lot of love but we're under-resourced), better partner pairing with engineers, balancing tech debt with new features, shipping directly to users builds empathy