My experience of moving into engineering management has very much been that I need to keep writing code to truly understand what people are facing, and ensure I

My experience of moving into engineering management has very much been that I need to keep writing code to truly understand what people are facing, and ensure I'm not coming up with crazy ideas that will be a pain to implement. The only caveat I'd add to that is that I can't keep on working on things in the critical path, at least as the sole developer picking up those tasks, because I'm hugely more likely to have things come up that prevent me from doing those things in a timely manner. That then leads to other people being blocked on my work. The best balance I've found is for me to either pair with a developer who's able to remain focused on a task when I'm inevitably dragged away to do something else, or for me to pick up non-urgent tasks like refactoring, or developer tooling. The latter is probably my favourite as it means I'm applying my experience to tools and libraries that can then be used in widely applicable circumstances to make the rest of the team more productive.