Advice for new directors

Directors must abandon the notion that they will keep doing the hands-on work they did as senior engineers. The real job is to operate through managers, turning weekly 1-1s and manager meetings into the primary arena where value is created. When you focus on those conversations, you move from personal output to organizational impact. The biggest trap is being either over-involved, crowding every manager's calendar, or under-involved, treating the role as just hiring and approving. The sweet spot is a flexible level of engagement that rises when a manager faces a tough problem and drops as they gain competence. Your responsibility is to train managers so that at least one can step into your shoes, and to keep the team's autonomy growing. Information disappears once you stop writing code. Without observability you're flying blind, which leads to gut-driven decisions and costly missteps. Build signals into the organization: attend demos, run skip-level 1-1s, collect metric snapshots from managers, and use product reliability data. Structured information flow prevents the "doctor without a diagnosis" syndrome. At the director level you work at a meta level. Shift from fixing individual tickets to shaping patterns across teams. Use constraints wisely, offer context, and design coordination models that let groups self-organize. Pair this with a mentorship network - peers, senior leaders, and external newsletters - to keep your own growth on track and avoid the distortion field that power creates.