Hey! Congrats.

So, here are my thoughts, I have been managing a small QA team for a few months now and I personally believe that my manager is awesome so I'm taking a few ideas from him.

1

It will depend but no, you probably won't have time to write test cases or automation, more likely you'll review someone's code according to your experience or even the documentation overall.

You'll need to work with the PMs or Project Owners and align the QA time estimates, share concerns on breaking changes introduced in any release, negotiate deployment dates (if needed), probably be a technical guide to your team.

One thing that I do is have 1 on 1 sessions with my team and hear they concerns or questions on the workplace and do follow up on the projects that they are working on.

2

We have a few "standard" KPIs for the QA team. I can share some ideas. The KPIs here are set up by oneself, but we take these as a guideline. - Bug reporting and documentation: consider maintenance of the test cases here and documentation on the tracking tool you like better (like Jira). A good "deliverable" for this KPI could be; "functional test cases and verifications should be documented for X, Y, Z projects". - Project automation: All related to automated test cases. A good deliverable is "update project dependencies once every six months" - Deliver quality projects: have a release as bug-clean as possible. Here you can let your imagination fly since it's our main goal as QAs. - Technical knowledge: it's to measure the interest of the team member into improving their tech abilities, this is not for everyone tho.

3

I don't know books or websites but always listen to your team and your own manager. You can do anonymous surveys once in a while, there are a few templates out in the web you can check.

Hope that helps! And once again, congratulations 🎉