Katie Bauer!

And even if you are the right manager archetype to match a team or IC's situation, you might be spread across more business areas than you have time to meaningfully engage with

Having overlap (beyond technical skillset overlap) between the areas your ICs work in reduces some of the pressure on you as the DS manager because means they have more ability to support each other. But it doesn't stop you from getting pulled between the breadth and depth poles

You can only do so many things at once. Or at least, you can only do so many things WELL at once. Which is to say: I'm not inclined to believe that thinly spread matrixed orgs generate the best outcomes unless all the ICs are pretty senior

And even then, this is another situation where a lot of pressure is being placed on a single person or too few people. Teams are guardrails that allow folks to take vacation, get sick, or move on to something else without leaving everyone else in a lurch

Maybe the real takeaway here is that DS teams are usually understaffed. Matrix orgs are an attempt to make the most of a difficult situation, but IMO they require a lot of skill and humility to manage well. The fact that they're so common for DS teams is nuts

I feel like professional settings are missing ways to provide some of these services without attaching 'lead' or 'manager' to the job title.

One thing that might help would be identifying the “design patterns” of DS work. There are a lot of canonical ways to build production-grade software, but I don’t know that those have been identified for DS

That's a hard one. The impostor stuff doesn't help, because people are compelled to try to put a data foot into a production shoe... and data feet seem to be way more heterogeneous than production feet.