Guides
Guides for engineering managers
Practical, no-fluff guides on performance reviews, feedback, and keeping track of your team's work.
How to write an engineering performance review (with a template)
A practical process for engineering managers: gather the evidence, decide the rating, then write something specific and fair. Includes a template you can copy.
Brag docs for your whole team: how managers track work between reviews
Brag docs are usually advice for engineers. Here's how managers can keep one for every person on the team in five minutes a week.
Performance review examples for software engineers
Side-by-side weak and stronger examples for every part of an engineering review, from impact to growth areas.
"Make us AI-native": a 30-day plan for engineering leaders
How to turn a vague AI mandate into a baseline, a few changed workflows, clear team norms and honest results in one month.
Your first 90 days as an engineering manager
A week-by-week plan for new engineering managers, from the listening tour to setting direction, plus what to stop doing as an ex-IC.
A fractional CTO's first 30 days: reading a team from the outside
A week-by-week plan for understanding an engineering team in a day or two a week, and showing the founder something useful by day 30.
Measuring AI coding tools: what to track and what to ignore
A short, honest set of team-level signals for judging whether your AI coding tools are paying off.
How to run 1:1s with engineers (with a template)
How to turn 1:1s from status updates into the most useful half hour of the week, with a template and questions you can copy.
Performance reviews when your engineers use AI agents
What counts as impact when agents write the code, and how to write reviews that reward judgement and ownership instead of volume.
Self-review examples for software engineers
How to write a self-review your manager can actually use, with before-and-after examples for every section.
How to show leadership what AI is doing for your team, without counting tokens
Token counts and AI-written lines mislead leadership and upset engineers. Here is what to report instead, on one page a month.