As Engineering leaders, it’s easy to get swept up by the day-to-day grind of delivering software. Code quality, broken builds, deployments that didn’t go according to plan, 1:1s, conflicts, stakeholders, and all the other things that fight for attention as we try to satisfy the organisation’s needs. This is us, working in our teams. We’re getting into the weeds of what’s going on and helping firefight issues as they come up. But to be effective in our role, we need to take a step back and think about how we can be working on our teams. To look for and cut through all the noise and waste. How can we improve our processes to build more robust software? How can we improve our ways of working to go faster? Where are we missing data that would allow us to make better decisions? If we’re not doing these things and just getting stuck in the details with the rest of the team, then what are we bringing to the table as leaders?