Here's a perspective from having progressed into management from technical roles, managing engineers and now back to doing engineering. My employees used to ca

Here's a perspective from having progressed into management from technical roles, managing engineers and now back to doing engineering. My employees used to call me 'meeting attender' since that was what they saw me do day-to-day. That was a big part of it - attending meetings with other teams, departments, etc. that want work done. Then prioritizing that work, and figuring out who on the team can get it done. Distilling large bodies of work into smaller chunks is key, but leave room for implementation details to be decided by your team. The delegation aspect is most important when transitioning. Setup a feedback loop after assigning work that is short enough to make sure an employee is on the path towards completion but not too short that you are micro-managing. Get out of their way and let them do work. Your best bet for staying hands on is to pick tasks nobody wants to do that are not on a critical timeline (probably the opposite of what you are thinking right now). Your role's primary contribution is organizing and managing work, building relationships with other teams and your customers (internal or otherwise). Managing engineers is a different job than engineering. Once you get a handle on delegation, coaching your team comes into play (which helps with delegation later).