Nice summary of what makes a tech lead manager. I could have said it in similar words. I was managing teams of up to 8 people this way. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but I basically always managed teams. Until I hit a roadblock.

It was a time when I was working with very little coaching from above. I thought I was doing well, I had great loyalty in the team, and I thought that I would soon advance to being an “ordinary” manager. Change of director, and much more involvement of the new person in what I was doing day to day, and soon I got very clear signals that I would not be manager material. That was it. Soon, the world was turned upside down, and a very different set of people came into lead positions, while others left. Apparently, a different culture had set in.

What I had to learn over time -

- managing up and managing across is at least as important as managing down. You can be the greatest coach to your team members, but if your prime internal partner isn’t talking favorably of you you’re not in a great position. I had only a few presentations to do for upper management, but those did not go well - partly because of content, but also partly because at the time I didn’t come across as confident. I wasn’t able to sell what we were doing, and that didn’t land well.

- the management that surrounded me liked the “sensing” type, in Myers-Briggs nomenclature, wheras I’m deeply rooted “intuitive”. What does this mean? Sensing types perceive the world as it is, through their senses. They value concrete actions and tend to favor short-term thinking. They get unconfortable when things are too abstract. Intuitive types create the world in their heads, and then bend the real world to become close to their imagination. You should know the culture you are surrounded by and how you fit in. Chances are that as a manager you are better of being a “sensing” type. As a leader, though, being a visionary might be just fine. These are needed, too, but they probably have not advanced through a management ladder.

- if your talent is in being a tech leader, this talent might become a liability if you’re leading teams. In fact you might have to deal with a team that has quite average technical talent compared to you, and you still need to let them go in order to maximize the team’s potential. Otherwise, chances are that they continue to look up to you to give them the technical direction, and that is neither a great way to boost their careers, nor a good way to remove yourselves as the bottleneck.

- There is an initial impulse to try showing what a great manager you are by asking for a large team. The opposite is true. Large teams are a liability, and require you to deliver large impact. It is better to be impact driven from the start, then the team size will follow suit. There might also be cases where you should ask for your team to shrink.

- The manager is also responsible for setting the tone, the culture of the team. This should be aligned with the business, not with the team itself. Typical example is when there are competing teams with overlapping responsibilities. A bad manager might just become competitive and play zero-sum games. If you’re doing it right, though, you become more of a diplomat, and reach a agreements that put both teams and the business in a position with less frictions. This might in fact be your only job for a long time, and so you better have a team that can work independently on the technical aspects.

Long story short, management is a profession that is very different from a development role and a TLM role. Being good at one is not a good predictor if the other, and in fact I would say they are slightly negatively correlated.