I think the move from managing engineers to managing managers is a bigger change than the move into management in the first place. The first move changes what you do. The second changes what you can see.
You stop seeing the work
A manager of engineers has direct access to the work, the pull request, the standup, the board. A manager of managers does not. Every signal arrives through another person's judgment, their summary, their sense of the week, what they chose to escalate. That distance is permanent.
The instinct is to close it. I think that is usually a mistake, because the time comes out of what you are now responsible for, the managers themselves. The distance is not a problem to solve. It is the shape of the job.
Your output is other people's decisions
The decisions that matter to a team, who works on what, what gets reviewed how, when something ships, are now made by someone else, in meetings you are not in. Your contribution is whatever shaped their judgment before they walked in.
I have come to think of that as the real output of the role. The time goes into what shapes judgment, being clear about what matters, explaining why, and talking through the hard calls afterward. A few decisions, usually about people, I still need to be part of.
Different is not wrong
Every manager runs their team a little differently than you would. At first every difference looks like something to correct. I think most are not. A team run differently from how I would run it, and healthy and delivering, is run well.
The exceptions have to be the same across teams, how people are treated, the standards the organization agreed to, and commitments to other teams. Those are not styles.
The feedback loop gets long
When you manage engineers, a change to how the team plans shows up next sprint. One level up, a change to how you support a manager might take a quarter to show. You can no longer trip over problems, so you have to decide on purpose what to look at, and how often. For me that means a few regular questions for every manager, and a few things I check even when nothing seems wrong.
What success looks like now
A good week as a manager of engineers was one where I did things. As a manager of managers, it is often one where I did little anyone could see and the teams did a great deal. I think the measure of the role is what happens without you, the decision made the way you would have made it by someone who did not need to ask.
Where this stops being true
On a small team, a manager of managers often still reviews code and makes many of the calls, and that is fine. Staying close enough to ask good questions is the job. Staying close enough to make the decisions is what to give up.
Photo source: https://photos.robertstowe.com/cumberland-island
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