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18 stations. 3 tracks. From the hardest promotion you will ever get — IC to manager — through 1:1s, feedback and performance, then strategy, stakeholders and org design. Learn to create through a team instead of a keyboard.
18 stations on 3 ladders, in order — each rung is written assuming the one above it. Mark them off as you go; your progress is saved in this browser.
6 rungs · ~5h · ends at Hiring & Interviewing.
F1 · Beginner · 50 min
The skills that made you a great engineer are not the ones that make you a good manager. Learn the fundamental shift — your output is now the team’s output — the trap of staying the best coder in the room, and why letting go of the keyboard feels like losing your identity before it feels like a promotion.
Build itName three things you were rewarded for as an IC that would now make you a worse manager. What replaces each?
✓ CheckpointName what you shipped last month. If everything on the list is something you personally typed, your output has not shifted yet.
F2 · Beginner · 45 min
The 1:1 is a manager’s highest-leverage recurring meeting — and the first one people cancel. Learn to run 1:1s that belong to the report not the status update: building trust, surfacing problems while they’re small, and listening more than you talk. Skipping them is how you find out about resignations too late.
Build itYour report says "everything’s fine" every week. Write three questions that get past the reflex answer.
✓ CheckpointExplain why a 1:1 where you did most of the talking was a status meeting wearing a costume.
F3 · Beginner · 50 min
Feedback is a gift most managers withhold until review season, when it’s useless. Learn to give specific, timely, kind-not-nice feedback — praise in the moment, correct in private, always about behavior not character — and to coach by asking questions instead of handing out answers that keep people dependent on you.
Build itTurn "your PRs are sloppy" into feedback someone can actually act on tomorrow. What made the original useless?
✓ CheckpointGive a piece of feedback out loud that is kind rather than nice — aimed at a behaviour, not at who someone is.
F4 · Intermediate · 45 min
Delegation is how a manager scales, and doing it badly is how they burn out. Learn to delegate outcomes not tasks, match the work to the person’s growth edge, and sit with the discomfort of watching someone do it differently — and slower — than you would, because that’s where they grow and you get your time back.
Build itYou keep taking back a task because "it’s faster to do it myself." Explain the compounding cost of that choice over a quarter.
✓ CheckpointDescribe something you delegated that came back done differently than you would have done it, and whether you let that stand.
F5 · Intermediate · 50 min
A team needs a legible way to turn priorities into shipped work. Learn just enough process — planning, standups, retros, backlog health — to create clarity without ceremony, spot when a project is quietly slipping, and know the difference between process that serves the team and process the team serves.
Build itA project is "80% done" three weeks running. What questions expose where the real risk is hiding?
✓ CheckpointName one ritual your team runs that you would defend, and one you keep only because stopping feels awkward.
F6 · Intermediate · 55 min
The team you build is the biggest decision you make. Learn to write a real role, run a fair and consistent interview loop, read signal past nerves and pedigree, sell the role honestly, and know that a rushed bad hire costs far more than a slow-filled seat — especially the one you have to manage out later.
Build itTwo candidates: one polished and average, one rough and exceptional. Design the loop that reliably tells them apart.
✓ CheckpointExplain the difference between signal and a candidate who reminds you of yourself.
6 rungs · ~6h · ends at Managing Yourself.
T1 · Intermediate · 55 min
Nothing tests a manager like a performance problem. Learn to set clear expectations before they’re missed, diagnose whether it’s a skill, will or fit issue, run a fair improvement plan, and act early — because a low performer you tolerate is a tax you charge every other person on the team.
Build itA senior engineer is technically strong but toxic in reviews. Is this a performance problem? Explain how you’d frame it.
✓ CheckpointTake an underperformance case and say whether it is skill, will or fit — and explain why the response differs for each.
T2 · Intermediate · 50 min
People stay where they grow. Learn to use the career ladder as a map not a weapon, have real growth conversations, sponsor people into stretch work and visible wins, and understand that promotion is recognition of a level someone already operates at — not a reward you dangle for more effort.
Build itA strong mid-level wants to make senior. Describe the stretch work you’d sponsor and the evidence a promo committee needs.
✓ CheckpointExplain the difference between mentoring someone and sponsoring them, and which one you have actually done recently.
T3 · Advanced · 50 min
The conversations you avoid are the ones that most need having. Learn to prepare for and hold the hard ones — underperformance, conflict, comp disappointment, letting someone go — with candor and care, leading with the hard thing instead of burying it under ten minutes of small talk that fools no one.
Build itYou have to deny a promotion someone expected. Write your opening two sentences — no cushioning that hides the answer.
✓ CheckpointExplain why burying the hard part at the end of a difficult conversation is unkind rather than gentle.
T4 · Advanced · 55 min
Teams don’t rise to your standards; they fall to their culture. Learn what psychological safety actually is — the belief you can take a risk without being punished — how a manager’s reaction to the first mistake or dumb question sets it, and why safe teams ship faster because they surface problems instead of hiding them.
Build itSomeone ships a bug that causes an outage. Describe your first public reaction and what it teaches everyone watching.
✓ CheckpointDescribe what your team saw happen the last time someone broke production — and what that taught them about reporting the next one.
T5 · Advanced · 45 min
Regretted attrition is expensive and quiet until it isn’t. Learn what actually motivates engineers — autonomy, mastery, purpose over ping-pong tables — how to spot the disengagement that precedes a resignation, and why the stay conversation beats the exit interview every time: one keeps people, the other explains why you didn’t.
Build itYour best engineer just went quiet in meetings. List the signals you’d watch and the conversation you’d start this week.
✓ CheckpointName one person on your team who is quietly disengaging, and what you would ask them before they resign rather than after.
T6 · Advanced · 45 min
You can’t pour from an empty cup, and management is a job with no natural stopping point. Learn to manage your own time and energy, resist becoming the bottleneck, find peers and a manager-of-managers to vent to, and separate your self-worth from a team’s outcomes you only partly control.
Build itEvery decision routes through you and you’re drowning. Name the three you should never have kept — and who gets them.
✓ CheckpointIdentify the decision your team currently cannot make without you, and say whether that is necessary or a bottleneck you built.
6 rungs · ~5h · ends at Managing Managers.
P1 · Advanced · 55 min
A manager translates fuzzy company goals into work a team can do and believe in. Learn to build a roadmap that’s a bet not a promise, say no to good ideas to protect great ones, connect daily tasks to why they matter, and keep the plan honest when reality — as it always does — disagrees with the quarter’s plan.
Build itLeadership hands you three "top priorities." Explain why three top priorities means zero, and how you’d force the ranking.
✓ CheckpointState a roadmap item as a bet: what you believe, what would prove you wrong, and what you gave up to fund it.
P2 · Advanced · 50 min
Your team’s work is judged through other people’s eyes. Learn to manage stakeholders — product, other eng teams, execs — by building trust before you need it, communicating status honestly (including bad news early), and turning a room of competing agendas into aligned support instead of a source of thrash.
Build itA dependency team is about to make you miss a deadline. Draft the message you send up before it becomes a surprise.
✓ CheckpointExplain why bad news early buys you credibility while bad news late spends it, even when the outcome is identical.
P3 · Advanced · 45 min
Real impact happens across team boundaries, where no one is in charge. Learn to lead through influence not authority — with product, design, data and other eng teams — clarify who owns what with a light RACI, and drive shared outcomes when the people you depend on don’t report to you and never will.
Build itA project spans three teams with no clear owner and it’s stalling. What’s the first artifact you create to unstick it?
✓ CheckpointName a piece of cross-functional work with genuinely unclear ownership, and how you would resolve it without a reorg.
P4 · Advanced · 50 min
Managing up isn’t politics; it’s making sure your team’s work is understood and resourced. Learn to give your own manager the context they need, disagree well and commit, bring solutions with problems, and represent your team’s reality upward so decisions above you are made with the facts, not despite them.
Build itYou think a top-down deadline is unrealistic. Describe how you push back in a way that gets heard, then either wins or commits.
✓ CheckpointExplain what your manager needs to know that they cannot see from where they sit — and how much of it you actually pass up.
P5 · Advanced · 50 min
As you grow, the shape of the org becomes the shape of the software (Conway’s Law). Learn to split and form teams around clear ownership, manage the handoffs a split creates, weigh the cost of every dependency you draw between teams, and re-org for a reason — not because someone above you got bored.
Build itOne team owns a service three other teams constantly wait on. Sketch two org fixes and the trade-off each makes.
✓ CheckpointExplain Conway's Law in one sentence, then name a system boundary at your company that exists because of an org chart.
P6 · Advanced · 50 min
The next step multiplies the distance from the code. Learn to manage managers — coaching leadership instead of doing the work, running a team through skip-levels without undermining, holding a consistent bar across teams you don’t see daily, and deciding whether the director path or a return to deep IC work is actually the life you want.
Build itA skip-level reveals a manager on your team is the problem. How do you act without going around them or ignoring it?
✓ CheckpointExplain what changes about feedback when the person receiving it manages people themselves.
The common questions before you start — how long it takes, whether to follow it in order, and how it stays current.
It runs 18 stations across 3 tracks — roughly ~16h of focused learning, plus the time you spend actually building. It is self-paced, so most people work through it over a few weeks, an evening or a single station at a time.
The tracks are ordered so each station builds on the one before, and following them start to finish is the intended path. But every station also stands alone — if you already have the foundations, jump straight to the part you need.
Yes. The whole roadmap, and every handbook, lab, and challenge it links to, is free and open — no sign-up and no paywall.
It teaches the durable fundamentals of the role first, then the tooling and the AI-era shifts on top — so most of it stays relevant as individual tools churn, and it is revised as the role itself changes.
Anyone stepping into or leveling up in the Engineering Manager role — whether you are switching in, early-career, or a senior filling gaps. Start where you are; the ladder shows what is left.
See this alongside everything else on the same subject — handbooks, system designs, challenges and tools, in one place.