Engineering Manager Toolkit

Structures and facilitates sprint retrospectives with a timeboxed agenda, format selection, anti-blame ground rules, and owned action items that actually close. Use when someone asks "help me run our retro", "our retros produce the same actions every sprint", "what format should this retrospective use", or "how do I get the team to say what they're really thinking". Do NOT use for incident postmortems with a timeline and root-cause analysis - use postmortem-writer instead. For diagnosing chronic team dysfunction beyond one sprint, use team-health-check; for planning the next sprint's scope, use sprint-planning.

Builds structured interview scorecards tied to role-specific signals to reduce bias and improve calibration. Use when opening a new role or auditing an existing interview loop for consistency.

Rolls up engineering team status into an exec-ready written update with exactly three sections - progress in outcomes, risks with likelihood and mitigation, and asks with owners and deadlines - scannable in under 90 seconds. Use when someone asks "write my weekly eng update", "summarize team status for leadership", "turn these standup notes into an exec update", or is prepping for a leadership sync. Do NOT use for updates to external or cross-functional stakeholders on a project - use stakeholder-update instead - for public incident communication - use status-page-update - or for monthly investor letters - use investor-update-writer instead.

Writes fair, specific, evidence-based performance reviews and ratings. Use when drafting or preparing for calibration to reduce recency bias and vague praise or criticism.

Assesses a team's health across three independent dimensions - delivery, morale, and clarity - using observable signals from the last 8 weeks, then maps each red or yellow signal to one manager action with a 2-week horizon. Use when a manager asks "is my team okay", "how do I tell if morale is slipping", "we keep missing sprints and I don't know why", or wants a quarterly team health review. Do NOT use for facilitating a single sprint retrospective - use sprint-retro-facilitator instead - for structuring individual 1:1s - use 1on1-agenda - or for defining how a new team works together - use team-charter instead.

Structures recurring manager-report 1:1s with a rolling shared agenda that balances check-in, blockers, two-way feedback, and career growth instead of status updates. Use when someone asks "what should I cover in my 1:1s", "build me a 1:1 agenda template", "my 1:1s have turned into status meetings", or is setting up 1:1s with new reports. Do NOT use for general meeting agendas - use meeting-agenda instead; for writing a formal review document, use performance-review-writer; for drafting a specific piece of feedback, use feedback-writer.

Drafts specific, observable, kind workplace feedback using the SBI model - Situation, Behavior, Impact - for both praise and correction. Use when someone asks "help me give feedback to a teammate", "how do I tell my report they keep missing deadlines", "make this feedback less vague", or wants to reinforce a good behavior specifically. Do NOT use for formal performance review documents - use performance-review-writer instead; for feedback on student work, use student-feedback-writer; for mediating an active interpersonal dispute, use conflict-resolution.