Courses > Leadership

Managing the Chaos -
Effective Engineering Leadership for High Growth Startups

4.5

(17 RATINGS) · COHORT-BASED COURSE 

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

Enroll today

HOSTED BY

Marian Kamenistak Engineering leadership course sq327
Marian Kamenistak
🎓 Engineering Leadership Mentor / Founder of 🇨🇿 Czech Engineering Leaders Community
Speaker / Series A-D Fractional Advisor /

Course overview

> Build and manage effective teams that thrive, even in unstructured environments

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.

We’ve written the course we wished we had when we started in Engineering Management.

> Who is this course for

VCs

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

Starting Managers

Rookie Engineering Managers eager to excel in fast-paced environments.

Experienced Leaders

Leaders with a few years of experience seeking to sharpen their skills and adapt to the unique challenges of high-growth companies.

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> What you’ll get out of this course

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

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.

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

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

Understanding what metrics are important

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

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

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

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

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

Communication techniques that will help you minimize dysfunction

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

Frameworks to keep your team healthy

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.

Our hard-earned lessons

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

> Course scheme

DAY ONE & TWO

Leadership Foundation

"I'm not feeling comfortable yet in my team leader role. It's like I'm missing some of the basic principles to navigate in people management, communication and delivering value. Sometimes, it really s**ks and I'm close to leaving"
Vaclav Ryska
Vaclav Ryska
Engineering Manager
"I'm in the team leader role for the 2nd month and I feel like not getting enough support. Not sure whom to ask for advice all the time."
dominik mostek jpeg
Tomas Resnik
Team Lead

DAY THREE & FOUR

Leadership Master

"Although we are working 120%, I was told we haven't delivered on half of the roadmap for the 3rd Q."
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Radim Smirky
Engineering Manager
"My team is performing quite well, but I recognize there's room for improvement in areas like career development for my team members, performance evaluations, one-on-one meetings, team health metrics, and in building a stronger relationship with my own manager."
Idan mentee
Patrick Friedman
CTO Startup

DAY ONE

00 Starting Point

  • Understanding Your Role Expectations and Goals on Your Shoulders, including Your Aspirations and PDPs
  • Engineering Manager scope in real
01 Behaviours
  • A perfectionist mindset will kill you ☠️ and slow your team down.
  • Communication and Trust Within Your Team
  • Delegating work vs. I’ll do it faster on my own
  • Go outside of your Bubble: Product, Teams

02 People-first

  • Decision: “I want to promote a developer to an Engineering Manager role. Is it the right timing? What are the right signals and warning signs?”
  • Developing Ways of Working and Team Agreements
  • Fostering Collaboration

DAY THREE

05 Team Stability

  • Establishing Team Fundamentals: Charter, Vision, Goals, and Objectives
  • Scaling software without over-engineering
  • Tactics: Real path How to get a team from a chaotic/firefighting situation to a highly performing mass

06 Team Growth

  • Understand: Team toxicity element severity
  • What holds me back?
  • Hiring: Funnel, How can I hook a candidate so they don’t accept an offer elsewhere?
  • What nobody talks about: Firing: How-to, set efficiency contracts.
  • Principle: Grow to scale the product, not the team.

09 Measuring what matters

  • Is there anything better than DORA / SPACE and other metrics?
  • What should I start measuring? Low effort high impact metrics exposed: Sprint completion, Epics cycle time, Roadmap Contribution, Adoption Rate, People Satisfaction

DAY TWO

03 Delivery

  • You only had ONE job!
  • Mastering Priorities, Backlogs, and Balancing Types of Work
  • Turning goals into plans
  • Keeping status and alignment in check
  • Shipping with confidence at an accelerating pace
  • Agility buzzword vs the reality of it

04 Communication Foundation

  • Understand: Mastering Communication is Your Secret Weapon: situations
  • Effective channels and tools
  • Managing up and sideways
  • Communicating with different stakeholders
  • How to escalate
  • Navigating conflict and difficult conversations
  • Underperformers and how to deal with them

DAY FOUR

08 Decision Making

  • Faster Conclusion: False decision is better than no decision. Fail fast.
  • Setting  Product Technical Principles to guide decisions
  • Scenarios: Decision making situations

09 Productive meetings

  • Daily standups dirty tips and tricks
  • Grooming and planning
  • The hardest one: Make the retrospective work
  • Turn 1:1s from status updates to relationship and growth

10 Change management

  • Accept change: Change is a constant in the universe.
  • Shuttle diplomacy tip
  • Story with a manual: How do I make sure my idea wins.

11 Follow up

  • Written summary of individual potential and additional findings
  • We can explore the option of mentoring individual aces of your team, ensuring your investment

> Is the course worth investing

We talk real stories. No book theory.

We roleplay the topmost stories interactively.

Stories and interactions make advice worth remembering so that we don’t repeat same mistakes ever again.

Marian helped me to stabilize and mature our engineering in Apify after a period of growth. In mentoring, we focused on many areas across product-engineering cooperation, career framework, team alignment, and agility. But mainly, he changed how I view my role and the role of the engineering department in the organization.
Marek Trunkat
Marek TrunkatApify CTO
Marian was my mentor for 3 months and I’ve learned a lot from him – communication with my own team and stakeholders, managing improvement plan in the team, hiring of new people. Marian has experience from multiple scale up companies, growing from 30 to 100+ people and that’s experience he can pass on to engineering managers and engineering directors. What I’ve appreciated a lot is directness and honesty in mentoring, challenging my own beliefs of what is possible and at the same time being very human oriented. I would recommend Marian as a mentor to anybody who really wants to grow in managerial role as few hours per week I’ve invested are several months saved on the journey.
Oleg Smirsky
Oleg SmirskyHead of Development @ Kosik.cz
There is no other mentor like Marian. Each session, each talk we had was inspiring and full of practical recommendations. He helped me to switch thinking from what i want to do as engineer to what actually helps the product and the team. I started applying his recommendations and not only it starts to bring value to the product it feels so good. Thank you Marian.
Dominik Mostek
Dominik MostekTribe lead @ Ataccama
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> Agreement Detail

Conditions

For the 2-day Leadership Foundation course, the price is 14.000 CZK per person in Central Europe, or 1.200 EUR for Western countries.

For the full 4-day Leadership Foundation and Master course, the price is 24.000 CZK in CE or 2.200 EUR for Western countries, per set.

Cohort: 6 - 12 people max.

I recommend splitting it into 2+2 days with a 1-2 week gap in between. I suggest having a dinner between the two days

Location: Either in your office or preferably outside. I'm happy to offer venues at a reasonable price that I've tried and tested, or please arrange a space on your end. Potential travel and accommodation is not price included.

Invoicing: I don't issue invoices in advance, only after evaluating that the course was successful based on feedback, and that's within a maximum of one month after the course. I believe in the principle of fairness and want to earn my counter-value fairly and obtain a positive reference from you.

Outcome

Managers who go through my course will be sufficiently improved so as not to make the top recurring mistakes leading to greater inefficiency or collapse.

I have an excellent overview of the top issues because I have been mentoring engineering leaders for 6 years, with 20y overall experience in the field. I know how to set up new team leads and give them a solid boost: instead of 'floundering' in a new manager role for 1-2 years

Community

I'd be happy to see your team leads/engineering managers at the Engineering Leadership community in Prague. After the course and getting acquainted, I'd be glad to accept their membership: https://www.engineeringleaders.cz

We organize meetups every 6 weeks; more details on the website. I'd also be glad to discuss the possibility of involving your company into the community more formally.

Engagement

I can inspire people for their mission, and I really like to see people in sessions who are enthusiastic about leadership and come to us with a desire for improvement. If we see individuals who do not match this, I'd be happy to give you a heads up.

Course adjutments

We can adapt the course both in content and length, and I am happy to offer an extended or online version with deeper topics.

Optional: Some companies like when I also offer a 1-hour individual mentoring session for all participants, where we discuss their situation and top burning issues, and they also receive specific guidance for their scene.

If we have a top participant/ace you care about, we can arrange for dedicated individual mentoring for your most potential performers.

Differentiators

I distance myself from general leadership programs and coaches in that I have gone through the same journey from developer to architect to manager, and I know what troubles our people and what it feels like when things don't work in the context of the nerd/geek world through the lens of an introvert.

Persistence: I build my program around stories. Stories sell, and people remember them much better. Other programs also have value, but the effect fades much more quickly (this is based on my experience; I have tried many).

Additionally, we dive into interactive scenarios for situations and then evaluate what was good or not, and how it can be done better: communication, decisions, priorities, operations vs. strategy, hiring, firing, and delegation.

We can conduct the course in both English and Czech; I recommend using the native language so that people can think and understand the nuances better during the course.

After the course, we collect feedback and a final rating.

At the end of the session, I send my summary and potential evaluations of the participants.

> Next steps

Please, provide an evaluation from your side and approximate timing. If you like the offer, I would request direct contact to the person responsible for the growth of team leaders, to understand the motivation in more depth.

It'll help us set the right topics and the course tends to gain higher value. Moreover, the tailoring specifics make me more excited for the mission 🚀

How Coaching Works » Marian Kamenistak
m1

I mentor / coach engineering leaders to grow and do product better. Software engineering leadership mentoring and coaching from engineering managers.

Course Provider: Person

Course Provider Name: Marian Kamenistak

Course Provider URL: https://www.kamenistak.com/mentoring/

Editor's Rating:
4.8
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