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Templates

Templates are not bureaucracy. They are the scaffolding that lets you focus on substance instead of format, and they create consistency that makes artifacts easier to read, compare, and act on.

This section provides copy-pastable templates for the most common engineering leadership activities. Each template is designed to be used immediately with minimal adaptation, while including enough structure to ensure you cover what matters.

How to use these templates

Start with the template as-is. Resist the urge to customize heavily before you've used it. Run it a few times, then adjust based on what your team actually needs. Templates that get heavily customized before use often accumulate complexity that serves no one.

When adapting, ask: does this change make the template more useful, or just more detailed? Detail is not inherently valuable. Clarity is.

Available templates

Template Use case
1:1 Agenda Structure for recurring one-on-one meetings between managers and direct reports.
Retrospective Facilitation guide and template for team retrospectives.
Postmortem Blameless incident analysis to learn from failures and prevent recurrence.
ADR (Architectural Decision Record) Document significant technical decisions and their context.
Growth Plan Quarterly development planning focused on outcomes, not tasks.
Hiring Scorecard Structured evaluation for consistent, evidence-based hiring decisions.
Working Agreement Team norms for communication, collaboration, and decision-making.
Runbook Operational procedures for common tasks and incident response.
Outage Communications Stakeholder communication during and after incidents.
Roadmap Review Periodic review of delivery progress and roadmap health.
Conflict Resolution Structured approach to navigating interpersonal or team conflicts.

Principles behind these templates

Written-first, remote-friendly. Every template assumes distributed teams and asynchronous workflows. Verbal-only processes don't scale and exclude people across time zones.

Outcome-oriented. Templates ask "what's the result?" before "what are the steps?" This keeps focus on impact rather than process compliance.

Blameless and people-centered. Postmortems, conflict resolution, and performance templates are designed to focus on systems and behaviors, not personal attacks.

Minimal viable structure. Templates include what you need and nothing more. If a section consistently goes unused, remove it.

When templates help (and when they don't)

Templates help when:

  • You're repeating a process and want consistency.
  • Multiple people need to produce comparable artifacts.
  • You want to ensure important aspects aren't forgotten.
  • You're onboarding someone to a new process.

Templates don't help when:

  • The situation is truly novel and needs freeform exploration.
  • The template becomes a checkbox exercise instead of a thinking tool.
  • You're using the template to avoid hard conversations.

A template is a starting point, not a substitute for judgment.