My name is Chris and I live in Orlando, Florida. I'm an engineer at heart but have spent the last several years in engineering manager roles. My current position at Twitch, an Amazon subsidiary, has me supervising 3 teams with responsibilities ranging from the client-side framework that powers www.twitch.tv, a 1.5m line React application, to our GraphQL-based, first-party API gateway, which serves about 60b requests a week. My role is to set the mission, vision, and strategy for my teams; interface and align with senior leadership; and provide engineering thought leadership to my colleagues throughout the company.In the the past, I've held a range of positions including full-stack developer, backend developer, mobile developer, and company co-founder. Because of the variety of roles, I have experience in a range of technologies — both front-end and back-end. While engineering management keeps me out of the code more than I would like, I can easily converse with engineers and other stakeholders to communicate complex ideas in simple, easy to understand terms. I'm a relatively hands-on manager. I think that engineering managers, including directors, must have at least a basic understanding of the technical details of the projects they supervise. While it's important to hire good lieutenants and delegate, there is no substitute for having the vocabulary to converse with engineers and other stakeholders.I think the most important value engineers, engineering manager, and others can exemplify is customer obsession. If you are customer obsessed, most of the other important values, like working backwards and digging into details, will follow. Without customer obsession, you are likely to focus on the wrong thing and lose site of what matters to your customers.