Key activities for sustainable engineering team
The signal loops that tell managers when to change altitude
Great engineering managers don’t just ship—they build organizations capable of shipping. But that meta-skill is rarely named, let alone taught.
Our book Engineering Manager’s Compass focuses on the unspoken rules of the role: how to read organizational structures, how to turn messy metrics into real decisions, and how to build teams that deliver without you holding everything together.
As a manager, your altitude changes.
Sometimes you need to fly high: looking at strategy, direction, and the broader system around the team. Sometimes you need to fly low: joining the details, removing friction, and helping the team through turbulence. The hard part is knowing when to change altitude.
When flying high, you might not be able to be present at every standup, every planning session, or every retrospective. Similarly when flying low, you might not be able to attend every sync, every ops review, or every business review. This is why it is important to understand the key activities that you need to be involved in, in order to ensure that you are present.
It’s all about being able to get the right signals to understand when to change your altitude. People often confuse these activities with Scrum ceremonies, but they are not. Scrum is one of many frameworks which often get used to manage software development teams. But it is by no means the only one.
Scrum ceremonies are one possible implementation but the real thing you need is a reliable signal. Let’s categorize these key activities into three groups:
Internal: These activities are focused on the team and their work.
Boundary: These activities are focused on the boundaries of the team and how they interact with the rest of the organization.
External: These activities are focused on the external environment and how it affects the team.
Some examples for internal activities are: standups, retrospectives, and planning sessions. Examples for boundary activities are: syncs with other teams, ops reviews, and business reviews, and examples for external activities are: customer feedback sessions, market research, and industry conferences.
Now let’s have a look at each of these categories in more detail.
Internal activities
Synchronization meetings
These are that set of activities that will be your probe to understand when it is time to fly low. As an engineering manager, you for sure will not be able to know all the details of your team’s work. However, you should be able to get a fair understanding by attending these activities.
A common way of working in software engineering is to have a form of synchronization session, where the team members share what they are working on, what they have done, and what they plan to do next. But most importantly, whether or not there is anything blocking them from delivering their work.
This is the signal that you are looking for.
In some cases, such synchronizations happen on a daily basis (standups), in others it happens on a weekly basis. When there is more turbulence in the team, it is often a good idea to increase the cadence of these meetings. You could classify 1:1s as a subcategory of such meetings.
Such syncs could happen synchronously where all attendees might gather together, but also asynchronously, where the attendees might either be leveraging a bot to which they send their updates or a document where they append it. These meetings can be held in person, over video calls, or through chat tools.
Regardless of the format and the cadence, these meetings are essential for you to understand what the momentum of your team is. If you notice that the team is struggling to deliver, you have your signal to fly low.
Reflections
Ellen Ullman once wrote:
Code and forget, code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.
Reflections are a key activity for any team, where the team will reflect on their work and identify areas for improvement. It is a great opportunity for you to understand what structural issues the team is facing, and what could be done to improve the team’s way-of-working.
One might even argue that this is the most important activity for you as a manager. Ultimately, a team that does not reflect on their work and does not identify areas for improvement, is doomed to incrementally forget and repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
Similar to synchronization meetings, reflections can also be held in various formats and cadences. They can be held at a regular cadence or it could also be done after a success or failure event. What ultimately matters is that you’re able to get good insights into how your team is evolving. And even more importantly, following up on the actions that the team has identified to ensure that the issues don’t repeat themselves.
Planning sessions
Planning sessions are crucial for setting your team up for effective execution. Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes two modes of thinking:
Fast (intuitive, automatic)
Slow (deliberate, strategic)
In the context of team planning, your goal as a manager is to help the team engage their “slow” brain during planning; thinking strategically, defining scope, priorities, and dependencies for the upcoming period. By investing effort in thoughtful planning, you reduce the need for the team to constantly switch between strategic thinking and execution (”fast” brain) during the work cycle, a context switch that is costly and disruptive.
Well-run planning sessions ensure that, when it’s time to execute, the team can focus on delivery without frequent interruptions to seek information, clarify requirements, or resolve dependencies. That’s when the probability of a team member entering a flow state increases.
Boundary activities
X-team syncs
Your team will frequently need to collaborate with other teams in the organization. The success of your team often depends on the effectiveness of these collaborations. To ensure smooth cooperation, establish regular syncs with other teams, similar to your internal synchronization meetings.
As these syncs tend to involve more participants and diverse perspectives, it is important to keep them well-structured. Use a clear methodology to focus discussions on improving collaboration, rather than assigning blame. This helps maintain a constructive atmosphere and drives better outcomes for all teams involved.
Ops reviews
When a F1 driver wins the cup, it’s not only because of their driving skills. It is a combination of their skills, the car they drive, and the team that supports them. Furthermore, each and every individual component of the car (tires, engine, brakes, etc.), the tooling (pit stop, etc.) and the team (the pit crew, the engineers, etc.) is essential for the success of the driver.
The failure of any of these components can lead to the failure of the entire team. In order to ensure smooth operations, F1 teams regularly check the performance of each and every component that is involved in supporting the driver. Regular checks of the tooling, oiling the engine, checking the brakes, etc. are essential for the success of the team.
Similarly, Ops reviews are your way of ensuring that the tooling, processes, and people that support your team are in good shape. Checking the Service Level Objectives (SLOs), the incident response processes, the tooling that your team uses. Having a look at the performance of the service, the number of crashes of the mobile app, the number of incidents, etc. Activities such as post-mortems or pre-mortems also fall under this category.
It is important to review these components together with your team and identify areas for improvement. This preventive approach helps you avoid potential issues and ensures that your team is well-equipped to handle any challenges that may arise.
Business reviews
Aligning your team with business goals and objectives is essential. Business reviews provide a structured way to ensure this alignment and to assess whether your team is delivering value to the organization.
During business reviews, evaluate your team’s performance from a business perspective. For example, if your team is responsible for the registration feature of a mobile app, review metrics such as the number of registrations, conversion rates, and dropout rates.
Ask questions like:
Have our recent deliverables positively impacted the business?
Are more customers using the product?
Has product adoption increased?
Regularly reviewing these questions with your team helps ensure you remain focused on delivering meaningful business outcomes.
External activities
Depending on the type of company you work for (B2B or B2C, product or service, early-stage or mature) you may need to engage with different external activities. These can include customer feedback sessions, market research, industry conferences, networking events, sales demonstrations, analyst conversations, and more. Your goal is not to collect every possible piece of information. Your goal is to collect enough external signal to help your team make better decisions.
Customer feedback sessions
Customer feedback sessions help you understand product pain, unmet needs, and the gap between how the team thinks the product is used and how it is actually used. If customers keep struggling with the same workflow, if support keeps escalating the same issue, or if sales keeps promising the same missing capability, that is a signal.
Your team may need to adjust its priorities, improve usability, revisit technical decisions, or clarify what problem it is actually solving.
Market and competitor research
Market and competitor research helps you notice strategic drift. You shouldn’t be imitating you competitors but you could use that information to lear more about the user expectations.
Being aware of what others are building will allow you to break your assumptions and build better products for your customers.
Industry conversations and conferences
Industry conversations, conferences, and professional networks help you notice changes in practices, tooling, regulation, hiring markets, and engineering expectations. These signals are often weak at first but if the same signal keeps appearing from different directions, it is worth bringing back to the team.
This could involve a new tool, technique or a methodology. Whatever it is, as long as the signal is strong (and your spider senses tell you that it’s not just a marketing gimmick) you definitely should share the information with your team and try to understand how they could leverage it.
Stakeholder syncs
Stakeholder syncs sit on the boundary between your team and the rest of the organization. They help you understand whether the team’s work is still connected to business priorities, customer needs, operational reality, and leadership expectations.
These meetings are useful when they surface changes early: a priority shift, a dependency risk, a customer commitment, a compliance concern, a sales pattern, or a support burden. They do however become dangerous when they turn into status updates. A good stakeholder sync should help both sides make better decisions. If it only exists so people can report that everything is fine, it is not producing signal.
Closing
The point of these activities is not to be present in all of them, but rather to be alert to the signals. Internal activities help you understand the team’s momentum. Boundary activities help you understand how the team interacts with the organization around it. External activities help you understand the environment the team is operating in. Together, they help you answer the most important management question: Do I need to change altitude?
If the team has momentum, alignment, learning, and enough external context, you can fly higher. If the signals show friction, confusion, repeated failure, or missed context, it is time to fly lower.
That is how you stay present without being everywhere.