Hey OP, sounds like we're in a similar boat in terms of role, tenure, experience, and (guessing from username) age. My email's in my profile, if you want to tra

Hey OP, sounds like we're in a similar boat in terms of role, tenure, experience, and (guessing from username) age. My email's in my profile, if you want to trade notes or just vent feel free to reach out. I think you're getting so much terrible advice in this thread, from everyone attacking you for writing code. You should be writing more code if that's what you like to do. I spend about two thirds of my time writing and reviewing code, take the lead new features (core and experimental), fix bugs, and generally work on whatever I find the most fun and think will be the most useful for customers. You can do the same and still lead a very large and fast growing company. This idea that as a leader you should abstain from doing real work is nonsense and results in bad leaders. If you find yourself stressed about the code you write adhering to everyone else's standards, I'd suggest 1) not worrying about everyone else (easy to say / hard to do), or 2) finding a commercially valid excuse to make a new repo and try some fun ideas out there. If the ideas are good, incorporate them into the main codebase and get back to what you do best.