When I've worked as an engineering manager I've found the advice to "stay out of the critical path of getting features into production" to be very helpful. It's difficult to commit to coding timelines as a manager, and it harms your team if you are the bottleneck to shipping something.
But... keeping your hands in the mix elsewhere helps you stay informed and make better decisions. I found writing things like internal debugging tools, documentation, helping out on code review and architectural discussions, building example features against APIs etc were all good uses of my time.
An interesting trend I've observed over the past couple of years is that a lot of my friends who had moved into engineering management and stopped coding completely are picking up more coding tasks now thanks to LLMs - previously spending ~4 hours getting a development environment working and getting back up to speed wasn't justifiable, but LLM assistance means they can now get something small and useful done in just an hour which is much easier to carve out time for.
“Your manager should be able to consistently make small contributions” is also a good litmus test for your developer env/tool/experience. If it takes more than 20 minutes to get set up and start working your team probably has a problem.
But... keeping your hands in the mix elsewhere helps you stay informed and make better decisions. I found writing things like internal debugging tools, documentation, helping out on code review and architectural discussions, building example features against APIs etc were all good uses of my time.
An interesting trend I've observed over the past couple of years is that a lot of my friends who had moved into engineering management and stopped coding completely are picking up more coding tasks now thanks to LLMs - previously spending ~4 hours getting a development environment working and getting back up to speed wasn't justifiable, but LLM assistance means they can now get something small and useful done in just an hour which is much easier to carve out time for.