I'm feeling stuck, how do I get out of it?

I’m a team lead but the job feels more like senior developer with some management responsibilities. In my previous job I had the same role but with much less hands on work and had the opportunity to lead multiple teams. I prefer that so I started looking for engineering management jobs. Here are some stats: ~30 applications out of ~100 reviewed job postings. Got 7 interviews out of which I didn’t pass the first or second interview step in 4. In the remaining 3 I didn’t pass the last interview with the hiring director or VP. These 3 interview processes took me a lot of time and energy. On average I had 6 interviews in each of them.

I’m not happy at my current job but I really try to be positive and productive as much as I can. The interviews are taking significant portion of my time and that affects my performance. At my current job I’m in the middle of very complex project which causes me a lot of stress. I joined this company with no previous experience in their tech stack. Somehow that didn’t matter for them and me. I thought this would be similar job to the previous one where I didn’t do much IC work. It isn’t and I think I made a mistake. Actually I took this job because I didn’t get another manager job I was interviewing for at the same time and the salary was much better than the one I had.

I don’t think I can leave my job right now to have more time for the job search. The financial risk will just increase my stress and it will negatively affect my interviews.

For the interviews I think I do everything I should (obviously not) by learning about the companies and their products, answering to questions with real examples from my experience (combined with how you are supposed to answer leadership/management questions), and being generally positive and enthusiastic about the jobs. I don’t get feedback from the companies even when I ask. Which I guess is expected due to possible legal risk or they just don’t bother.

The reason I’m looking for manager instead of team lead roles is that I don’t think I’m good with combining management and IC responsibilities. I feel way more confident when focusing only on one of them. I could go back to IC only role (I still get the thrill of solving problems with code) but I strongly prefer management responsibilities at this point. I understand that in a lot of companies managers are expected to be hands on but there are some that this is not the case and I got rejected at those.

So I really don’t know for how long I can keep doing this. It has been 4 months since I started looking for a new job and the current one is just getting more stressful due to mainly how I respond to the whole situation I’m in.

Does anyone with similar experiences have some ideas about how I can help myself?