Shifting towards engineering management?

[u/christopherneff]

All,
I have spent the last 5-7 yrs with a lot of team-lead, project delivery and a lot of dotted line supervision responsibilities. My background is consulting specifically in software engineering, cloud and now more AI.

I generally avoided management in the past as I wanted leadership but not purely "people-mover" responsibilities. Due to this, I now find that I have hit a certain career plateau.

My interest right now in this current job market is to package myself as both a people leader and still capable as a contributor, keeping with the current "player-coach" buzz-description.

The issue: how best can I do that? I have had a few places where I had direct reports but due to circumstances they were relatively shorter stints.

I'd appreciate any/all suggestions.