In too many teams, everything goes through the Engineering Manager.

Leading Developers

Engineering managers often become bottlenecks by centralizing all decisions and prioritization. As teams mature, managers should distribute ownership by assigning engineers specific 'kingdoms' - areas like applications, microservices, third-party integrations, or critical tools. Kingdom owners make decisions, prioritize work, monitor health, and serve as go-to experts for their domain. The approach works best with 1-2 kingdoms per engineer, giving them both pride and dedicated time to manage their areas effectively. Success requires empowering engineers with decision-making authority and development time, not just dumping responsibilities.

Give your engineers a kingdom

Empowering engineers with true ownership not only scales decision-making but also cultivates accountability and growth.

One of my manager taught me a life learning.
Your job as a manager is just to be a facilitator.

This article giving me inspiration on how to handle a team, nice 👍

Unclear accountability is my experience is one of the strongest poisons in an corporate tech setting.
Having domains or kingdoms have some drawbacks too, but accountability is a great thing to have for both tech and non-tech processes.
In startups though, depending on your team configuration, might even make you slower. As anything else with software architecture, it depends.

Also known on-the-job as subject matter expert (SME)