What traits are looked for when moving an engineer into a software leadership role?

This is an answer to a question submitted to the "Ask me anything (AMA)" program. This AMA channel is designed to support you get clarity to business/tech questions you may have. Periodically, I select a particular response that we feel can benefit the broader community.

My favourite way of framing this answer:

Taking small, disparate and unrelated seemingly innocuous building blocks and raw materials

• Helping people visualise the desired outcome (the what and the why they understood the business needs from product management).
• Helping people go through a process to identify the best how.
• Eliminating blockers.
• Creating opportunities.
• Uniting teams.
• Creating something useful and of value that delivers a tangible and viable solution to a customer to scope, on time and to budget.
• Enabling engineering resources to walk away with pride at what they created, looking forward to what the world can be tomorrow with a new set of challenges.