As a very senior leader, how do you balance "being in the details" vs "micromanaging"? Or perhaps being in the details might not be an appropriate goal for a high-level manager?

Each person in a leadership position has a unique personality and skillset. It's important they find ways to continue to offer their strengths to their team and product while also doing the job of a leader: providing direction and clarity, supporting team members of various skill levels and seniority, coaching team members, and giving them opportunities to learn and grow.

In my case, I love thinking through potential visions and strategies, breaking them down into tactical plans, and actually getting into the detailed user problems and potential solutions to solve them. I love whiteboarding with engineers, participating in design sprints, and learning from data and user research. And I especially love using my products again and again to build empathy for users and form visceral product opinions on quality and what's working vs. not. I'm not shy about giving feedback in any of these kinds of activities. I can be tough in terms of holding high standards, asking hard questions, and giving detailed feedback on documents to try to drive clarity.

Given my personality and skills, I do need to take steps to be sure I'm appropriately delegating and coaching. I try to regularly match important opportunities to people's skills and seniority, and I tune my level of support to each person and project's need.

In many cases, PMs, engineering managers, tech leads, or designers have the skills and experience to lead projects to success with very little guidance. In these cases, all I need to do is help align folks on goals, clarify a decision process, or ask people to think through a potential future concern. Whenever this is the case, it's a win! It means I can put my own energy into solving some problem for the team that only I can solve. In other situations when hands-on help is needed, I try to check in with folks regularly to be sure I'm helping in a way that they find helpful and not disempowering.