There is a role in our company that fits exactly to your description: (software) requirements engineer.

There you totally focus on technical items, you need to clarify them, you need to prioritize them, you need to have an eye on the overall picture, find extreme and boundary situations. You will of course have some administrative tasks too, estimating and planning - but not to the extend as a project-manager does. You will have interfaces to the architects/implementers and the testers - and probably to do some testing yourself. You will also have close customer contact - however that is not so bad, as you would focus on technical discussions. All financial negotiations would be done by the project manager instead.

You will however no longer do any coding.

Another possibility for you could be software tester or test manager. As a good tester you have to have a close look at all border-situations of the software (as the straight-forward-cases usually work). Here you could still do some coding for test-automatization (automating tests is still a kind of buzzword which makes the eyes of the managers shine ;-) .

The drawback is that such a job is not as respected as other roles in software development (at least not in the companies I worked for - testing is often seen as a "training program" for implementers) - and therefore the payment is lower. And as a tester you will never have enough time/budget to test all the things you consider necessary - so there is a risk of getting frustrated...

Nevertheless, with both recommendations above you will not be too far away from your current job - so switching back is always a possibility...

Good luck with your (new) career! Rata

In reply to Re: On considering a career change by Ratazong
in thread On considering a career change by talexb

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