Courses > Leadership Workshop

Managing the Chaos -
Effective Engineering Leadership for High Growth Startups

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

We understand geeks. No generic leadership wisdom. We go deep. We go real.

COHORT-BASED COURSE   ·   2 + 2 DAYS   ·  86 NPS FEEDBACK SCORE  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

We differ: We make our Leadership Academy Workshop #unique by tailoring it to your specific culture, values, situations and ambitions.

HOSTED BY

Marian Kamenistak profile picture - engineering management coach

Marian Kamenistak

🎓 Founder and Chief Coach at Engineering Leaders Community « 🚀 $200M+ Series A-D Fractional VP Engineering « Lecturer/Moderator/Speaker

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

Starting Managers

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

VCs

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

Advanced Leaders

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

Engineering leadership meetup 7
worshop for engineering managers at NN in March 2024
Engineering leadership meetup 6
Engineering leadership meetup 3
leadership workshop on site
leadership focus
leadership academy

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
Dominik
Team Lead

DAY THREE & FOUR

Leadership Master

"Although we are working 120%, we haven't delivered on half of the roadmap for the 3rd Q."
os jpeg
Oleg Smirsky
Head of Delivery
"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

  • ⭐️ The truth about your role expectations and goals: EM triangle
  • Engineering Manager scope in real: What responsibilities are the ones you should pay the most attention to
  • Embrace what truly motivates your teammates
01 Behaviours
  • The top 5 behaviours that kill a new team lead like a plague

02 Focus 

  • ⭐️ How you can ensure your teams keep focused: impact of WIP limits, roadmap, and the 10 condiments
03 Value Delivery 
  • Mastering Priorities, Backlogs, and Balancing Types of Work
  • Meeting ceremonies tips and tricks
  • ⭐️ Agility buzzword vs the reality of it
  • Understanding the whole product flow vs being blind in the implementation
04 Be Smart in Company Goals/OKS 
  • ⭐️ Understanding the bigger cycle of OKRs/goals and got it interconnects with team cycle: creating alignment and focus

DAY THREE

07 Team Stability

  • ⭐️ Turn the new team lead to a pro in the first 90 days: Week by week full tactic exposed.
  • How to keep your team in balance
  • Why we are here and the product

08 Team Growth

  • ⭐️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.

10 From a Mediocre to High-Performing Team

  • My full real path exposed, step by step
  • Growing from 8 to 30 teams in 2 years

11 Metrics That Truly matter and Nobody told you about

  • 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

05 Communication Foundation

  • Communication principles
  • ⭐️ 1:1s: Managing you 1:1s like a pro in both directions 
  • Productive meeting tips and tricks: standups, grooming, plannings, retros.
  • ⭐️ How to gather and receive feedback, both positive and negative, with no issue
  • Not happy: Navigating conflict and difficult conversations. How to talk to people we hate

06 Communication Mastery

  • ⭐️ How to manage communication with underperformers, narcissists, and talkative experts
  • ⭐️ How do I manage the decision-making meetings
  • ⭐️ 6 levels of convincing others about your idea/proposal: from stupid to a pro
  • How to communicate with the top management
  • Non-verbal communication: understand the non-spoken meanings

DAY FOUR

12 Understand Career Growth for Your Team

  • ⭐️ How to be a master at performance review meetings
  • How to enable career growth in a lightweight form
  • How to benefit from career framework

13 Enable True Learning – Your Topmost Value

  • ⭐️ How to run horizontal communities
  • What learning set to offer to employees, other than Udemy and PluralSights.

14  Boost Your Work-Life Balance ⭐️

  • Things that work vs American 5am wake-up books
  • Make yourself efficient at work
  • Home sweet home
 

15 Be the Master-blaster in Change Management 

  • Change is the only constant in the universe
  • Don’t start executing the change right away
  • How we ensure the change sticks
  • ⭐️ Full tactical template exposed
 

16 ⭐️ FINAL: Leader Worth Following

  • What defines you being the LWF
  • Live your Leader Worth Following story

Workshop Outcome form

NN workshop feedback 85 NPS score highly positive
  1. Full attendee feedback
    • NPS score
    • The top 3 surprising and valuable topics
    • Anything to improve
    • Final thoughts
  2. Action items coming from the workshop
  3. Full slides
  4. Free registration to Engineering Leaders Community, including invites to upcoming meetups
  5. Summary towards HR from the leadership potential perspective

Is the course
worth your investment

  1. We leave generic leadership wisdom behind the door.
  2. I was in there with you, from writing code to team lead, principal architect in Silicon Valley, up to top management.
  3. . I turned companies from crisis to a well-working orchestra, where engineering is not a cost center but super-powered teams, killing competition.
  4. We dive deep into real, story-driven discussions that I happen to experience.
  5. We customize each workshop like Lego, tailoring it to your unique culture, values, situations, and ambitions.
  6. My secret KPI? How many participants are taking extra notes while we talk.
  7. 💰 No advance payments. We’ll settle the final payment only and only if the attendees’ feedback is highly positive. We stick to the principle of Fairness.
  8. We use the right language form and the language: simplified native English  or Czech.

Build your LEGO.

Before we start, we'll tailor the workshop from the proposed topics as LEGO pieces.

We make it fit to your current company stage, culture, and ambitions of your leaders, ensuring we reach the top added value, embraced by highly-positive attendee feedbacks.

Marian Tweet
avatar list testimonials mentored
Marian’s wealth of experience was incredibly valuable to me. In 5 months, Marian has taught me to look beyond daily tasks and set long-term goals. This shift in perspective has greatly enhanced my planning and strategic thinking . Marian’s mentorship has accelerated my learning and influenced my leadership style. Thanks to Marian, I was able to share my insights as a speaker at the Engineering Leaders meetup, an enriching experience in my career path I believe that anyone who has the opportunity to work with Marian will benefit greatly from his experience and guidance.
jv
Jan Vrtiska
Engineering Manager @ Pure Storage
ondrej kofron
Ondrej Kofron
CTO @Carvago
Marian’s wealth of experience was incredibly valuable to me. In 5 months, Marian has taught me to look beyond daily tasks and set long-term goals. This shift in perspective has greatly enhanced my planning and strategic thinking . Marian’s mentorship has accelerated my learning and influenced my leadership style. Thanks to Marian, I was able to share my insights as a speaker at the Engineering Leaders meetup, an enriching experience in my career path I believe that anyone who has the opportunity to work with Marian will benefit greatly from his experience and guidance.
Full testimonials

Selected Clients

ACTION: Tailor the workshop for your Leaders

  1.  Build your LEGO: create a workshop where you gather the desired topics, group them and define the main areas/stream we want to embrace.
  2. Let me know about your ultimate cocktail 🙂
  3. Let’s have an onsite or online finalization session together. This will allow us to understand your motivation, current stage, and desires and tailor the content to your specific needs.
  4. Agree on the scope, time allocation, concrete dates and organizational details.
  5. Run the workshop, have fun, gather the full feedback.
  6. We’ll provide the a feedback summary, including the workshop NPS score and personal comments.
  7. Enjoy seeing the specific boost and fruition coming from our workshop.
  8. In addition, allow your engineering leaders to join our community. No one-offs. Make their education continuous.

Agreement DetailS

Conditions

For the 2-day Leadership Foundation course, the price is 900 EUR per person.

For the full 4-day Leadership Foundation and Master course, the price is 1550 EUR per seat.

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.

Social media: We are fine with taking screenshot pictures and event pictures, including attendees, We are both eligible to use pictures and event information to highlight the cooperation on social media. However, the details and tne content of the workshop stay private.

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

No certificates but change in perception of the World, identifying leadership principles of our own.

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

Is speak to attendees as a friend, not an all migthly lecturer.
There will be no certificates but practical knowledge we seek to gather.
There will be little to no slides but loads of writing, stories and interaction.
There will be mini-homeworks at the end of each day.
After each day 4-5pm, you are privileged to book an extra individual consultancy hour to help you in your unique situation.

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.