My One-on-One System for Engineering Leadership

A visual approach to shared mental models and joint problem-solving

Come with me on a gemba walk through my favorite part of the daily work.

This post describes one part of my engineering management system: how I design and run my one-on-ones. All my previous experience was an open agenda document where anyone could add discussion points. My system is different and more powerful. 

Adopting this format was an inflection point in my career. It profoundly changed how I viewed myself as a leader and my working relationship with my reports. I cannot imagine doing this job without it. I’ve taught managers to use it in their teams, thus creating a system of pull-based authority. 

I’m sharing my system so you can be a better leader and manager. 

First, the genesis and mental model behind this system of engineering management.

The Genesis

Two tributaries led to the genesis moment. The first is my deep affinity for visual management, learned from years of self-study on all things lean. The second was when my company purchased the book Radical Focus for all team leads. These two things gave me just enough to restructure my one-on-ones completely.

Radical Focus is a book on doing OKRs well. Two things stood out to me. First, it was the first OKR book I’d read with a method (do you hear Dr. Deming’s “by what method?” question) for working to the key results. Second, the method was visual management.

Here’s an image of the “four quadrant” meeting format described in the book.

The 2x2 format from Radical Focus

First is OKR confidence. Second, health. Third, priorities. Fourth, the next four weeks. So, first the right-hand side, then the left-hand side. The OKRs are graded confidence from one to ten. Step two is health metrics. The team grades them red, yellow, and green. Next is this week's priorities, basically what needs to be done regarding key results and metrics. Lastly, some low fidelity short-term time horizon planning.

I saw how I could create something from this to help my team. My first step was adapting it to include my team's business-as-usual and other work. The second step leveraging our existing SLOs and other ops metrics covered in weekly ops reviews for the health section. We had already established blue-yellow-black grading, replacing the common green-yellow-red grading. That was enough for iteration zero.