Your first priority is your people. Without them progress stalls.
You want to encourage a culture of innovation within your team. This can be achieved by promoting a learning environment and encouraging experimentation. Additionally, implementing processes for continuous improvement in workflows, tools, and techniques can help your team become more efficient and adaptable to change.
Establish a clear, strategic vision that aligns with overall business objectives. Effective collaboration also involves advocating for engineering needs and constraints while understanding and supporting broader business objectives. Your vision should inspire your teams and provide them with a clear direction on where the organization is heading and how they contribute to its success.
Establish and maintain high standards for code quality, performance, and security. This involves overseeing the implementation of best practices in code reviews, automated testing, continuous integration, and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and ensuring the architecture is scalable and maintainable.
I considered a more direct focus on revenue but that might lead to prioritizing short-term gains at the expense of long-term value, such as innovation or technical debt reduction, which can harm the product and the company's reputation in the long run.