Engineering Managers

Complete guide for running effective 1-on-1s with direct reports, including prep, agenda, and follow-up.

Acts as a critical Red Team consultant to pressure-test your product strategy, identify hidden assumptions, uncover potential weaknesses, and validate market fit before presenting to executives or committing resources.

Create strategic technical roadmaps aligned with business goals

Structured PIP template for ICs with clear expectations, support plan, and success metrics. Starts at 85% complete.

Mediation guide for resolving technical disagreements or interpersonal conflicts between engineers.

Clarify project roles: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. Map who does what on complex projects.

Comprehensive system design review with scalability and reliability analysis

Complete retro facilitation guide with agenda, activities, and follow-through plan.

Framework for mediating conflicts between Product and Engineering teams over priorities, scope, or delivery.

Define decision roles: Driver, Approver, Recommender, Consulted, Informed. Clarify who makes decisions and who has input.

Assess and prioritize technical debt in your codebase

Facilitate effective sprint planning sessions with your team

Create comprehensive performance reviews for engineering team members

Decide whether to build custom solutions or buy/integrate existing platforms. Calculate TCO and risk.

Categorize initiatives into Quick Wins, Big Bets, Fill-ins, and Time Sinks. Prioritize strategically.

Plan effective sprints with capacity planning and risk assessment

This task is intensely time-consuming, and managers struggle to be specific with concrete, behavioral examples. They often fail to recall a full year's worth of data and default to recent events, leading to reviews that feel unfair or incomplete.

EMs often feel their team is "slow" but have limited visibility into the why. Bottlenecks can be external dependencies, slow approval cycles, or resource mismatches.

30/60/90 day PIP checkpoint meeting template with structured assessment and feedback.

New EMs often fall into the trap of doing all the project management or writing code themselves, which makes them a bottleneck and hinders their team's growth.

This is the task most managers dread. They need to be clear and direct about performance gaps while also being empathetic and avoiding legal or HR pitfalls.

Hiring is a core EM duty but is a major time-sink. Poor onboarding leads to slow ramp-up time and frustrates senior engineers answering repetitive setup questions.

Design comprehensive eNPS surveys that provide actionable insights. Includes question design, survey timing, anonymity considerations, and response rate optimization.

Transform raw eNPS survey data into actionable improvement plans. Identifies patterns, root causes, and priority action items from quantitative scores and qualitative feedback.

Prioritize initiatives using ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) scoring - a simpler alternative to RICE for quick decision-making.

Convert structured SOPs into Confluence-ready format with proper formatting, macros, and page structure.

Extract workflows from Slack threads, Loom videos, or Notion pages and generate structured, version-controlled SOPs with step-by-step actions, decision branches, and tool references.

Convert structured SOPs into Notion-ready format with proper blocks, callouts, and database properties.

Plot initiatives on a Value vs Effort matrix to identify quick wins, major projects, time sinks, and fill-ins.

Analyze existing SOPs, detect outdated references, suggest updates based on tool changes or team restructures, and generate changelog entries.

Prioritize work using WSJF methodology from SAFe - perfect for agile teams balancing value, time criticality, and job size.

Prioritize work based on Cost of Delay - how much value is lost by delaying each initiative.

Systematic debugging approach for on-call engineers to efficiently diagnose and resolve issues during incidents, including investigation workflows and common debugging strategies.

Develop operational runbooks for common tasks, troubleshooting procedures, and standard operational procedures for DevOps teams.

Comprehensive guide for on-call engineers covering preparation, incident handling, communication, self-care, and continuous improvement.

Develop a comprehensive incident management plan including roles, escalation procedures, communication protocols, and response workflows.

Develop comprehensive on-call procedures including rotation schedules, escalation policies, handoff procedures, and on-call best practices.

Guide engineers on how to communicate effectively with customers during incidents, including status updates, technical explanations, and empathetic responses.

Create comprehensive post-incident reviews documenting what happened, root cause analysis, impact assessment, and action items to prevent recurrence.

Create KPIs and OKRs for measuring engineering team success, including velocity, quality, and team health metrics.

Develop detailed incident recovery procedures including rollback plans, failover procedures, data recovery steps, and service restoration workflows.