Purpose.
ENGINEERING LEADERS
Most demanded topics
Engineering Managers
Team leaders
” With first-time leaders, my goal is to set you up for success in 3-6 months instead of letting you sink or swim for 2 years.
I evaluate your personality, potential and help you discover your principles.
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Set me up for a new manager role! Raise my potential. our company grows fast.
- How do I educate myself and outrun others? What engineering leadership sources/blogposts/podcasts are worth following?
- What to focus on in the first three months in the team leader role? I want to ensure my team succeeds.
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I'm lost in the priorities of my team. It's more of a firefight
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- 🤡 What is broken in my agility pipeline? Our ceremonies are a mess. We deliver half of sprints all the time.
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There is no teamwork. Our team is a bunch of individuals.
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I have an under-performer or a silent introvert in my team. What options do I have? How to involve them?
- How to cooperate with your Product manager, Agile coach, and stakeholders.
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How to communicate with your peers and your direct manager.
- Help my identify my sweet spot and land my dream job. 🛬
- Do I want to go the manager track or the senior technical track?
- How do I conduct better 1️⃣:1️⃣'s?
- Help me to plan roadmap initiatives for a successful 8️⃣0️⃣%+ roadmap delivery.
- 📐What are the right quality and success metrics? What's the best way to visualize and communicate them?
- How to move my tribe from outputs to outcomes mindset? 🧘
- How to resolve dependencies across multiple teams.
- How to lead high-potential talents? 🤝
- How to apply change management in our environment?
- I communicate with your manager and the peers like a charm. 🎙️
- Help me set up the delivery process end to end, including continuous discovery, delivery, and adoption. ⚙️
- How to set up and evaluate performance goals so that people actually ❤️ the reviews?
Engineering directorS,
Tribe leaderS
” Allow me to help you to change your mindset. Move away from being busy, scale your teams while hitting delivery goals in parallel.
Given you now who you are, get better at how you work.
CTO
Engineering VP
” You feel alone in your thoughts, squeezed between two stones. Executive management is asking you to hit the goals, while your teams are asking for help. You’re looking for an experienced person to validate and execute your ideas/improvements.
Execute your mission. Save quarters to years going left and right. I’ve experienced how a fine-tuned engineering ecosystem works. I know how it feels. I will guide you to reach that fragrance.
- How do I define and measure success? Mission, product KPIs, quality and success metrics. 📺
- How do we think about structuring teams as we continue to scale? Think verticals, Conway's law.
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How to set up, execute, and evaluate the product / technical strategy? Aim to deliver
+% of the roadmap all the time.
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How do I make OKRs work in the company? Connect objectives up to tasks.
- Help me create a solid hiring pipeline, including brand and community. 💂♀️
- Moving away from a firefighting situation to a predictable environment ❓
- How to set up agility mindset, succeed to hire agile coaches and establish your agile community 🚴
- 🚀 Help me to land the right career framework for my mission, company, structure and culture. Make people learn and grow.
- How to execute performance reviews and calibrations?
- 💰How to allocate budget? Predictable payroll/non-payroll costs.
Are you ready for mentoring?
If you’re interested in more complex scenarios, see the case studies or read my blog posts.
Engineering leader mentoring guide
An initial mentoring session is free of charge.
Each subsequent session has a clear outcome summarised at the end, with agreement on a principal follow-up action item for the mentee to progress toward.
Location
On-site in Prague, Czech Republic.
Remote through video call.
How it works?
Rule no.1
You are hungry to grow. 🌳 If interest or progress is low, the lessons will be canceled. My aim is to help those who express a high level of motivation. Our time on Earth is expensive.
Rule no.2
All specific topics and personal issues are not be communicated outside of our sessions. What’s said between us, stays between us. 🙉
Rule no.3
We are well organised. We clearly define a top follow-up topic. We check the progress at the beginning of each session.
Scope
1️⃣ At the first session, we aim to get to know each other, understand the motivation, and draw a set of initial milestones on the timeline to ensure we'll be heading in the right direction.
2️⃣ The following sessions primarily tackle specific operational issues a mentee expects to cover.
3️⃣ After we pass 4-5 sessions, I tend to steer the focus towards our pre-agreed goals, moving away from operational to strategic thinking.
⬆️ Get even more inspiration from the most in-demand topics above. Though you must already have a good starting point since you've come to this page
Cadence
I recommend a one-hour weekly or bi-weekly frequency so that the mentee has enough time to digest the information and action a follow-up item.
After three months, we’ll debrief to review progress and provide feedback, optimally with your manager. We’ll take a momentary break to keep our to-do list from getting too long.
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.
4.5/5
Marek Trunkát
CTO at Apify
20
+
mentees
CTOs, EVPs, Directors and team leaders mentored
15
+
new leaders
New engineering leaders educated personally
110
+
sessions
1h mentoring or coaching sessions
2
+
countries
🇨🇿 🇺🇸 🇸🇰 🇩🇪 🇬🇧 🇮🇱 🇳🇱
Why mentoring?
In an engineering leader’s context, I consider mentoring more valuable because it allows me to guide and develop the skills and knowledge of the engineering managers over a longer period of time. This can lead to more sustainable and effective improvements in the team’s performance, and help the engineers on the team become more effective and well-rounded leaders themselves.
Mentoring vs coaching explained
What are the reasons that make me lean towards mentoring instead of coaching?
Mentoring is generally considered to be more suitable for developing long-term skills and knowledge, while coaching is more focused on short-term performance improvement. Because of this, mentoring is often considered to be a more comprehensive and holistic approach to development.
Coaching, on the other hand, is a process in which a coach helps an individual or team improve their performance or achieve specific goals. The coach may focus on specific skills or behaviors, and may use techniques such as goal-setting, feedback, and problem-solving to help the individual or team improve.