SERIES: LDD vs TDD
This series goes into detail on what I call 'secondary' developer activities, or development overhead. Development overhead is anything that engineers spend significant time doing that doesn't involve writing or debugging code, but is still essential or important to the job. These activities are part of the cost of doing business with engineers. As a technical or non-technical manager minimizing the time spent on these tasks, while still maintaining effectiveness and quality, should be top priority.
If you are managing a tech team, your goal should be simple, and that is to maximize the time engineers are writing and debugging code. Your focus should be on minimizing time engineers spend getting product and technical requirements, as well as some tasks related to testing, documentation and other common tasks.
This is not to say they shouldn't be done, but if e2e testing can be handed off to the QA department, technical documentation can be trusted to an intern, and the technical manager and/or product manager can do a good job insulating engineers from the rest of the organization, then engineers can maximize their time doing what they were hired to do, write and debug code.