As a technical leader, the biggest hurdle I faced personally was understanding how to measure and improve myself in the right ways. While success in an enginee

As a technical leader, the biggest hurdle I faced personally was understanding how to measure and improve myself in the right ways. While success in an engineering role can generally be described as "write good code" (with all the nuances therein), technical managers are measured on totally different things, and it isn't obvious how to improve most of them. When I transitioned and realigned myself to these things, my outlook changed, and I started really enjoying leadership roles: * Embrace the idea of being hands off technically. I have never seen a hands on technical manager that worked out well - politics will always come into play. Instead, encourage friendly inter-team debate, which you can coach and steer into a healthy dynamic to make the right decisions. Feel satisfaction that the team you build creates better engineering than you could alone. * Focus on helping your team lead fulfilling careers and lives. See in them what they could become in 10 years and help them achieve it, even if it sometimes conflics with your short term interests. * Build amazing products - The leader is way more instrumental in this than often credited. * Create a great team environment that people want to be a part of. * Get a seat at the business table - you should absolutely be a big part of the product roadmap. Done right, eventually you should have sales/customer teams coming to you for advice and input like 'Customer X wants Y, what do you think?' * Create great communication flow - make sure everyone else knows how important your team is, and help your team see how what they do contributes, and how the market/product is changing and why. On your comment about fighting fires and other managers - you can change this. These things make any job unpleasant. I strongly recommend reading The Phoenix Project to get some ideas from an IT perspective - it can easily be read in a weekend and addresses exactly these common problems.