Cohort 1

Confidently lead engineering teams that ship and scale using techniques and lessons acquired through real-world experience.

Juan Pablo Buriticá

Executive Product & Engineering Leader

James Turnbull

VP of Product and Engineering, Smartrr

Managing the Chaos - Effective Engineering Leadership for High Growth Startups

Engineering Management can feel like a trap, but hey, someone's gotta do it! A move into Engineering Management can feel like a promotion, but it's a whole new job. Rather than learning that new role on your own, let us share what we've learned from our experience. Get a headstart or strengthen your existing skillset with frameworks, templates, and real-world, proven strategies that we have refined through scaling multiple Engineering teams. This course shares the most important lessons learned in 15+ years of leading engineering teams in early-stage and high-growth startup companies. * Shipping working software confidently and with increasing velocity* Setting and communicating strategy* Managing remote and outsourced teams* Growing your team* Goal setting* Tracking and reporting progress through metrics and KPIs* Partnering with Product and Design* Keeping your team healthy. We've written the course we wished we had when we started in Engineering Management.

Effective Engineering Leadership in Startups

Engineering managers with a few years of experience eager to excel in fast-paced early-stage and high-growth startup environments.

Experienced leaders seeking to sharpen their skills and adapt to the unique challenges of early-stage and high-growth startup companies.

Early-stage and startup founders and CTOs looking to accelerate the pace of their teams' software development and delivery.

Who is this course for

What you’ll get out of this course

Get clarity on what you need to do as an Engineering Manager in early-stage and high-growth startup companies, so you can take the lead, guide your team, and help your company succeed.

Examples to guide and think about your role as an Engineering Manager

Discover how to manage multiple tasks, stay focused, and deliver high-quality software in a startup environment where everything moves quickly.

Beyond the basics knowledge on how to ship and support impactful software in a chaotic environment

 

Hone your skills in establishing and interpreting meaningful metrics that drive your team's growth and make a measurable impact.

Understanding what metrics are important

Establish clear goals, define your team's roles and responsibilities, and build a team culture that encourages productivity, collaboration, and innovation.

Ready-to-go templates to define fundamentals for your team, such as goals, charter, structure, capacity, etc.

 

Unnderstand your role as a leader and how you can use your technical skills to guide your team, optimize processes, and encourage technical excellence.

Strategies to approach your technical influence and responsibilities as a leader.

Create the communication skills to overcome conflicts, align priorities, and ensure everyone cooperates smoothly.

Communication techniques that will help you minimize dysfunction

 

Find out how to create a positive team culture that encourages personal growth, technical excellence, and long-term success, so your team can stay healthy and engaged.

Frameworks to keep your team healthy

Learn from our mistakes before you make the same mistakes yourself.

Our hard-earned lessons

<ul><li>Understanding Your Role</li><li>Establishing Team Fundamentals: Charter, Vision, Goals, and Objectives</li><li>Measuring what matters</li><li>Developing Ways of Working and Team Agreements</li><li>Fostering Collaboration,</li><li>Communication and Trust Within Your Team</li></ul>

Building and Leading Teams in a Chaotic Environment

<ul><li>You only had ONE job!</li><li>Delivering without dogma</li><li>Mastering Priorities, Backlogs, and Balancing Types of Work</li><li>Turning goals into plans</li><li>Budgeting</li><li>Vendor Management</li></ul>

Shipping Products While Juggling Flaming Chainsaws

Bonus: Q&A with Juan & James

<ul><li>Setting Technical Principles to guide decisions</li><li>Crafting and refining coding practices and guidelines</li><li>Scaling software without over-engineering</li><li>Technical Decision Making</li><li>Traps for young players, don’t rewrite it in [new language]</li><li>Shipping with confidence at an accelerating pace</li><li>DORA / SPACE and other metrics</li><li>Observability &amp; operational Excellence</li></ul>

Unleashing the "Engineering" in Engineering Management

<ul><li>Effective channels and tools</li><li>Managing up and sideways</li><li>Productive team meetings</li><li>Communicating with different stakeholders</li><li>Priorities and expectations</li><li>Navigating conflict and difficult conversations</li><li>Keeping status and alignment in check</li><li>Talking about technical debt</li><li>How to escalate</li><li>Gracefully handling incidents</li></ul>

Communication: Your Secret Weapon Against Dysfunction

Course syllabus

Executive Engineering Leader & Author of The Manager's Path

What people are saying

Meet your instructors

We designed the course for busy leaders.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday

Getting started projects ground all students on foundational concepts so we can go deep during the live sessions.

Pre-work

You can choose to complete post-course projects for personalized feedback highly relevant to your current role.

Post-course work

Course schedule

One-on-ones are important, but there is so much more to leading engineering teams. We will show you the way.

Go beyond the basics

We're neither coaches nor consultants. In fact, both of us recently left established companies to join early-stage startups and the tools you'll get are the ones we're using today.

We're living our content

Leadership is less lonely with a supportive community of peers. The cohort community will have your back.

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