My perspective is a manager of a product team on an app with high growth. My team has our own backend and we interface with other platform teams for specific functions in the finance space.

> How do you insure you are working on the most important items for the TEAM?

Push PMs to make decisions on metrics not gut. My contribution is to add engineering and operations toil metrics to our dashboard. Eg. If the onboarding funnel is converting at 90% but our average time to resolve tickets is a week, it's easy to prioritize fixing some bugs over endless A/B tests in the funnel. Have really open and regular dialogue with the team about what they want to work on and where their gaps are, try to put them on projects that help them grow.

I also try to have my team interact with other teams as much as possible- customer support, operations, pm, design, other teams. I find it helps give engineers a more holistic picture of the business, the people and pain behind functions and get in the mindset that delivering business value or reducing toil for people can be more exciting than bringing in a shiny new library to our codebase.

> Whats the thing that drains you the most?

Honestly I have too many direct reports (12). I spend so much time in 1-1s and meetings unblocking people, and despite all my effort the team is not getting as much coaching as I want. I'm an introvert as wells so it's exhausting. I'm working on hiring other managers and organizing us into smaller teams, my goal is to have a 4:1 engineer to manager ratio this year.

> Where do you reach out to get advise outside of your company?

Mostly I read a lot, blog posts and books.

> What is missing from the tools you currently have?

I think my main problem is there are too many tools. JIRA hurts almost as much as it helps, slack is a disaster for focus. I'm trying to cut down on tools lately (eg. move out of JIRA, just have a lightweight planning doc with some tables). It works for shorter cycle projects when you have a strong team.

One tool I would appreciate is something that keeps me accountable for evaluating performance and giving good performance feedback more regularly. I'm good at reflexive feedback but really deep meaningful feedback takes time to craft, and it's easy to let it slip with the barrage of information in the modern workplace.