Recent experience has taught me to think of those type of people as delivery managers, rather than people managers, and so long as they understand the limits of

Recent experience has taught me to think of those type of people as delivery managers, rather than people managers, and so long as they understand the limits of their knowledge they can be invaluable. I've worked with two people who were excellent in that role, they work with the rest of the business to clearly define priorities, and to ensure they understand what we can and can't deliver. When it comes to hard technical decisions they delegate to technical leads and developers, but they have enough experience of engineering to be able to intuit whether what they're hearing makes sense. I've also worked with someone in the same position, but without the self awareness to know where his knowledge ended and it was time to delegate. That was possibly the worst six months of work I've done, but thankfully he was eventually forced out by the board.