u/Conscious-Fact9532

I've been an EM for almost six years now and lately I've been thinking about going back to being an IC. Partly bc the market, but also bc I just miss building stuff. But when I actually sat down to figure out how I'd present myself for that, I realised that this is actually not as simple. As an IC back then I had a commit history, projects, stuff I could point at. As an EM I've got… what? "Teams I ran went well, nothing broke, trust me."

Someone on here some time ago described EMs as having "weak external signals"; your impact ends up living in your old manager's memory. There is barely any relevant artefacts and basically no portable proof.

So for anyone who's gone back and forth, or who hires EMs: what actually counts as proof you were good at this? Is there stuff people do while they're still in the role to leave some kind of trail or just something to show for in general? Right now I am starting to suspect there just isn't, and it's a remember-and-retell thing you redo every time you change jobs. However I would love to be wrong on that.

Spent most of friday writing the weekly update for leadership. Again. Pulled the Jira stuff, chased three people on Slack to find out where things actually landed, rewrote it twice so it'd read right to the VP. Couple hours gone. The thing it was reporting on didn't take much longer than that to build.
And it's never just once. Something slips, someone upstairs asks for a status, and producing the status eats the time we'd have used to unblock the actual thing. At some point the updates kind of became the work.

What I can't figure out is whether that's me being bad at this or just the job now. Half of me wants to make it vanish - one doc people can read on their own time, kill the syncs. But I think the reason they keep asking is they don't really trust the system to tell them, and a tidier report doesn't fix that.

So for people who've been at this longer: is it just overhead you've made peace with, or did something actually change it? And the honest one - when you have to show leadership your team was worth it, what do you reach for?

Not sure when it happened but I've turned into the person everyone pings to find out what everyone else is doing. What shipped last week, who owns this thing, what's the status on that, did X actually land. Constant. Most of my day now, genuinely. And I've basically stopped doing anything that looks like actual work.

None of it shows up anywhere either - to anyone above me it just looks like I sit in Slack all day. You only notice the coordination when it stops and something falls through. So is this just me, or does every team grow one of these people? And if you've been the de facto "context broker" - how did you get out of it, or at least get it to count for something at review time?

Hey everyone,

I’m managing a rather large product catalogue and it constantly keeps expanding. Keeping all the copy on brand and somehow aligned between the different products takes a lot of my time. Considering SEO aspects is of course another aspect. Especially when there are changes required (which sure shouldn’t happen that often anyway but every now and then it does come up) that then have to be made throughout the whole catalogue.

I’ve experimented with different AI approaches, but so far nothing really went beyond a patch to fix the worst.

How do you deal with this with this problem? Has anyone found a good solution?