This is a good read and I'm a fan of Julie's thoughts and her recent book. However, at least for smaller teams (<50 engineers), I don't agree with "Effective managers are typically not involved in the details of the team’s technical work." Instead, I'm a big fan of being able to "lead from the trenches" when necessary. Giving value-added comments in pull requests or design reviews can be a great way to "power-level" your team. Sure you don't have to be the one coding, but its good to know the technical reasons driving decisions. Maybe we don't need a fancy event-bus for communication between these two services in this case. For smaller teams, I'd prefer "Eyes-on, hands-off" management--but it would be hard to be eyes on if you are not involved, at least as an observer, in the details of the team's technical work.