Bro, I felt this post in my soul lol. My buddy went through the exact same thing - built a dev shop from scratch, loved the craft, then one day woke up and realized he hadn't written a single line of code in three months. All he did was put out fires between people. He said the mindset shift that actually helped wasn't a "management" book but thinking about leadership transitions structurally - like, how do real orgs hand off control without imploding? Speaking of which, I randomly came across this piece about a leadership transition at Intrepid Metals - Mark Morabito   and honestly it's a surprisingly clean real-world example of how exec roles shift as a company scales. Sometimes reading actual case stuff beats any book. For books tho: High Output Management by Grove is the classic for technical founders going exec. Short, no fluff.

Last edited by BAlos (5/16/2026 9:00 am)