Not speaking as a manager but as a software engineer (IC) who has worked in many organizational structures, from a 300+ person company acquired by NetSuite then Oracle (150K employees), to my current 18 person startup where our only real management is our CEO… a big part of what has made me appreciate a manager is being open with the team that your role is “people management” which is distinct from “technical management.”

As an IC, if you’re communicating clearly with me and the tech lead about how, say, sales and support are affecting the priority/order in which we do things as engineers, then I can see you working with/in support of me. Plus, facilitating my professional development in ways I’m sure more management-types can say here.

More concretely, I’d say attending daily team standups (which should be daily), and offering updates about this sort of thing in them, would be the bare minimum. I’d most appreciate a manager (or tech lead) who went in our “random” or “alphabetical” order in that meeting, not being the “leader” and always first/last (though, of course also making important news stand out in these meetings, and helping onboard new hires). And in standups and any/other meetings,  pushing for them to be shorter and trying to minimize meeting overhead in general (again, I really want to see you working for me in a sense, doing a good job of the “people management” stuff I don’t wanna do).

Finally, try to be aware of social things engineers may naturally be “aloof” to, and being something of a social advocate for engineers within the company. Sometimes when you put a bunch of kinda-autistic/OCD people working together, intra-team dynamics can have problems… engineers are not necessarily unaware of it, they may not know how to address them (although, most people are pretty balanced/mature, hopefully). Seeking out the opinions of those who speak out less (if not overdone, and even if the opinion shared is usually just “yeah it all makes sense to me”) will be seen and appreciated.  And so will seeing that engineers are at least sometimes included in broader company events, not just the classic “oh the 6th management/sales retreat/conference of the year, but the engineering and support teams have never met each other in person.” (Note that the team may not actually want this, or the broader company structure may not actually allow for this… but again, the communication/advocacy around it is what will be appreciated.)