The 90-Day Rule Every New Engineering Manager Gets Wrong
New research from 2,400 global tech teams reveals the single most costly mistake leaders make in their first quarter — and what the best ones do differently.
When Aarav Singh took over a 14-person backend team at a Series B fintech, he did what most new managers do: he kept shipping. Six months later, two of his best engineers had quit, sprint velocity had dropped 30%, and his skip-level was asking hard questions. "I optimized for output instead of people," he told us. "I didn't realize they were entirely different jobs."
Read More →Why Your Microservices Are Slowing You Down
Staff engineers advocate for the modular monolith — and the performance data is compelling.
The VP Who Mentored 40 Engineers Into Director Roles
Inside Deepa Krishnan's structured mentorship programme at Razorpay.
The $0 Leadership Toolkit: 9 Open-Source Tools for EMs in 2026
From 1:1 templates to OKR trackers — curated from the Vault community.
"The best engineering managers don't optimize their teams. They optimize themselves — and the teams follow."— Sarah Guo, Conviction Capital
This week we examine communication habits that separate great managers from good ones — specifically the art of the skip-level conversation, a tool wildly underused in Indian and Southeast Asian tech orgs.
Read More →The Delegation Trap: Why Smart Leaders Keep Doing Junior Work
If you're writing code while managing 8 engineers, you're signalling something important — and it's not what you think.
Read More →Building Your Personal Board of Advisors at 30
A Staff SWE at Google shares how she assembled a 5-person informal advisory board that shaped her entire trajectory.
Read More →Accelerate Your Leadership Journey
1:1 sessions with vetted Senior Engineers, EMs, Directors & VPs. Free community tracks available. Intensive paid coaching for those ready to accelerate.
Find a MentorJoin as Mentor"I Fired a 10x Developer. It Was the Best Thing I Ever Did."
Vikram Sharma, Director of Engineering at a $2B unicorn, speaks candidly about team culture, the myth of the rockstar developer, and why psychological safety is his north star metric.
"We had this engineer who shipped more code than anyone. He also made three people cry and killed two hires. Output is measurable. Damage is invisible until it's catastrophic."
Read More →Manager's 1:1 Template Pack
12 battle-tested templates for new managers. Notion + Google Docs.
Free · GitHubOKR Tracker for Engineering Teams
Spreadsheet-based with cascade views and confidence scoring.
Free · GitHub360° Feedback Framework Pro
Anonymized review system with sentiment analysis. Self-hosted.
Paid · $49/yr"Why do programmers prefer dark mode?"
"A senior developer, a PM, and an AI walked into sprint planning..."
The AI estimated 2 days. The PM wrote "by end of sprint." The senior dev quietly updated their CV.
This week's Vault comic takes a hard look at estimation culture in modern tech orgs — and why "done" means something completely different to everyone in the room.
What was said vs. what was meant
- 01"No blockers"→ I have 7 blockers
- 02"Almost done"→ I haven't started
- 03"Quick win"→ Incident incoming
- 04"Legacy code"→ I wrote this in 2022
- 05"Ping you async"→ Never speaking again
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