Leadership

The chapter where staff and team lead candidates most often sound generic. Everything here should become a concrete story or a concrete practice you can describe in ninety seconds, with a number in it.

Two structural habits carry most of the weight. First, tell stories in SCOR rather than STAR: Situation, Complication, Options, Result and reflection. The Options slot is the whole game, because it is what makes a story sound like judgment rather than a resume bullet. Second, for any role-play, state your first move, the information you would gather, and the line you would not cross. That three-part structure turns a vague answer concrete.

What this chapter covers

• [done] Capacity math and forecasting covers the three-bucket budget and forecasting with cycle-time percentiles instead of story points
• [done] On-call design covers rotation size, page budget, interrupt shield and toil cap
• [done] Unblocking: the four blocker types
• [done] Growing people covers the skill matrix, stretch ratio, the delegation ladder and SBI feedback
• [done] PR review as a leadership lever covers the SLA, PR size, the comment taxonomy and review order
• [done] Promotions and the calibration room
• [done] Product partnership: options with costs, and owning the non-functional requirements
• [done] Retention and motivators
• [done] Hiring: scorecard first, defending the bar
• [done] Written-first culture, ADRs, managing up
• [done] Managing former peers, and glue work
• [done] Legacy modernisation as a narrative
• [done] The toxic code reviewer
• [done] Making the reliability investment case
• [done] The engineer who has missed three commitments
• [done] The impossible date
• [done] Two teams building the same service
• [done] Promotion when they are one level short
• [done] Building a story portfolio
• [done] The underperformance sequence
• [done] The AI-era review queue
• [done] The metrics a lead watches
• [done] A PM promises a date
• [done] Inheriting a team with low morale

Source: §8, §23, §38.6, §48.