Tech Radar
Maintain a tech radar that sorts technologies into adopt, trial, assess, and hold against a real evidence bar, and pairs each adoption with a sunset. Use when an organization needs a shared, current view of which tools and techniques to reach for and which to retire.
Rfc Process
Run a Request for Comments process so a proposal reaches the right audience, collects objections inside a bounded window, and records a decision people can point to later. Use when a change affects teams beyond the author's and needs durable buy-in.
Launch Review
Run a launch review that gates a release behind a readiness checklist, named sign-offs, and a clear no-go authority. Use before shipping a user-facing launch where a bad release is costly to walk back.
Design Critique
Run a design critique with a clear presenter contract, feedback rules that attack the work not the person, and captured decisions. Use when a designer brings work in progress to a group for structured feedback rather than approval.
Data Engineer Role
Operate as a data engineer who ships pipelines to a freshness SLA, enforces schema contracts at the source, and owns data quality end to end. Use when building or reviewing a pipeline, warehouse table, or ingestion path that other teams will trust.
Accessibility Review
Audit a UI for real accessibility, keyboard-first, with concrete failures and fixes rather than checkbox compliance. Use when reviewing or building any user interface.
Prfaq Working Backwards
Write an Amazon PR-FAQ that starts from a launch-day press release and hard customer questions so an idea is tested on the customer before it is built. Use when proposing a new product or feature and you need to prove it is worth building.
Oncall Handoff
Hand off an on-call rotation by transferring open incidents, watch items, and the tribal context runbooks miss. Use at the end of a shift or rotation when the pager passes to the next responder and continuity of understanding matters.
Canary Analysis
Judge a canary release against a concurrent baseline using pre-set metric gates, automatic rollback, and statistically honest windows. Use when a deploy is rolling out to a slice of production traffic and you must decide pass, hold, or revert.
Product Designer Role
Operate as a product designer who designs the whole flow, specs every state, defends the work in critique, and hands off at build fidelity. Use when designing a feature, running or joining a critique, or preparing a handoff to engineering.
Api Design
Design HTTP and library APIs that are predictable, hard to misuse, and stable under growth. Use when creating or reviewing endpoints, public functions, or wire formats.
Cto Advisor Role
Operate as a CTO-level advisor who turns business goals into build-or-buy calls, org design, technology bets, and a named risk posture. Use when a leader needs a technology strategy that a board and a finance team will both accept.
Design Doc Google Style
Write a Google-style design doc that argues a decision through context, goals, and rejected alternatives before code is written. Use when a change is large enough that picking the wrong approach is expensive to undo.
Deprecation Program
Run a deprecation from telemetry through a hard sunset date so a system can be retired without breaking the callers who still depend on it. Use when you own an API, library, endpoint, or service that must be turned off and other teams still use it.
Developer Advocate Role
Operate as a developer relations (DevRel) engineer who closes the loop between external developers and the product team. Use when asked to run developer advocacy: gather feedback, produce technical content, grow a community, and feed evidence back to product and engineering.
Okr Cascade
Cascade OKRs so team and individual goals ladder up to company strategy without sandbagged targets or scoring that rewards easy wins. Use when setting quarterly or annual objectives across more than one team and you want alignment, not a spreadsheet of restated tasks.
Exec Briefing
Brief executives with the answer first, the whole thing on one page, risks paired with the decision you need, and no surprises. Use when you must get a decision or an update in front of leadership who have five minutes and no context.
Six Pager Narrative
Write an Amazon six-pager, a narrative memo read in silence at the start of a meeting so a decision rests on reasoning rather than a presenter's charisma. Use when running an operating, strategy, or investment review that must reach a real decision.
Quarterly Planning
Run quarterly planning with honest capacity, negotiated cross-team dependencies, and an explicit cut line that names what will not get done. Use when a team commits to a quarter of work and needs the plan to survive contact with reality.
Mobile Engineer Role
Operate as a mobile engineer who plans around release trains, a real device matrix, and app-store rules that a web engineer never faces. Use when building or reviewing an iOS or Android feature and you need mobile-specific release and compatibility discipline.
Platform Engineer Role
Operate as a platform engineer who builds golden paths for internal developers and earns adoption on merit. Use when asked to design an internal developer platform, pave a common workflow, or prove a platform is being adopted.
Performance Engineer Role
Operate as a performance engineer who sets budgets, gates regressions in CI, and runs profiling as a service other teams rely on. Use when latency, throughput, memory, or GPU utilization matters and you want measured wins, not folklore optimizations.
Dogfooding Program
Run an internal dogfooding program with staged cohorts, one feedback intake, and numeric exit criteria to general availability. Use when a pre-release product needs real internal use to surface bugs and adoption risk before it ships to customers.
Growth Engineer Role
Operate as a growth engineer who moves a funnel metric through instrumented, fast experiments and refuses to win with dark patterns. Use when your job is to raise activation, retention, or conversion with measured changes, not guesses.
Open Source Review Board
Run an open source review board that gates incoming dependencies on license compatibility, sets the policy for contributing back, and requires a security review before adoption. Use when an organization needs consistent control over which OSS it pulls in and what it publishes.
Architecture Review Board
Run an Architecture Review Board that reviews significant technical proposals through consistent lenses, issues binding decisions recorded as ADRs, and offers an appeals path. Use when architectural choices cross team boundaries and need a durable, accountable decision rather than a hallway consensus.
Ml Engineer Role
Operate as an ML engineer who takes a research model to reliable production behind eval gates and keeps it healthy across its lifecycle. Use when asked to productionize a model, build a training or serving pipeline, or set promotion criteria.
Chaos Gameday
Run a game day that injects a real failure into a system on purpose, under safety rails, to test whether monitoring, runbooks, and responders actually work. Use when you want to verify resilience before an incident does it for you, or to rehearse a team on a failure they have never handled.
Backend Engineer Role
Operate as a backend engineer who designs stable API contracts, guards data integrity, and ships services that are operable on day one. Use when building or reviewing a service, API, or data path and you want production-grade engineering discipline.
Product Manager Role
Operate as a product manager who picks the right problem, writes the spec, makes the tradeoff calls, and owns the launch outcome. Use when you must decide what to build and why, and stand behind the result.
Accessibility Specialist Role
Operate as an accessibility specialist who audits against WCAG, trains teams to stop shipping the same defects, and owns the compliance sign-off. Use when a product needs to be usable with a keyboard, a screen reader, or magnification and someone must certify it before launch.
Vendor Evaluation
Evaluate vendors against weighted criteria, a proof of concept that tests your real workload, and a clear-eyed accounting of exit costs before you sign. Use when choosing a paid tool or service you will depend on and a wrong pick is expensive to undo.
Principal Architect Role
Operate as a principal architect who owns the boundaries between systems, curates the technology set, and spends veto power sparingly. Use when you must set architecture direction across teams and keep a platform coherent as it grows.
Code Freeze Management
Manage a code freeze with a scoped declaration, risk-classed changes, a fast exception process, and a planned thaw. Use when you need to stabilize a codebase ahead of a release, a holiday peak, or a high-stakes event without halting all work.
Cloud Architect Role
Operate as a cloud architect who lays the landing zone, governs cost, and sequences migration for an organization. Use when asked to stand up a cloud foundation, put guardrails and cost controls in place, or plan how workloads move to the cloud.
Bar Raiser Interviewing
Interview as an Amazon-style bar raiser who holds an independent veto and judges each candidate against the long-term hiring bar. Use when you sit on an interview loop as the neutral interviewer accountable for the bar, not for filling the team's open seat.
Hiring Loop Design
Design a hiring loop where each interview gathers distinct signal against an anchored rubric and the debrief resists groupthink. Use when standing up or fixing an interview panel and you want a decision based on evidence, not overlapping impressions.
Security Development Lifecycle
Apply Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle so threat modeling, tooling, and sign-off are built into each phase instead of bolted on before ship. Use when building or shipping software that takes untrusted input or handles sensitive data and you need a repeatable security process, not a one-time audit.
Devops Engineer Role
Operate as a DevOps engineer who owns the delivery pipeline, keeps environments identical, and makes every deploy reversible. Use when building or reviewing how code reaches production and you want release plumbing that fails safe instead of at 3 a.m.
War Room Protocol
Run a war room for a live incident with defined roles, a steady cadence, a decision log, and explicit stand-down criteria. Use when a high-severity outage or crisis needs coordinated response across teams and the improvised version is descending into chaos.
Production Readiness Review
Run a production readiness review that checks SLOs, runbooks, capacity, and dependencies before an on-call team agrees to own a service. Use when a service is about to be onboarded to a support rotation or handed from its builders to operators.
Data Scientist Role
Operate as a product data scientist who frames falsifiable hypotheses, analyzes experiments, and reports results without flattering the launch. Use when asked to design an A/B test, read out an experiment, or turn a metric question into a decision.
Open Source Maintainer Role
Operate as a company-employed open source maintainer who runs governance, licensing hygiene, and community health for a project the business depends on. Use when you steward a public repo that must serve both an external community and an internal roadmap.
Incident Commander Role
Operate as an incident commander who owns the response to a live outage: severity, coordination, and communication, not the fix itself. Use when a production incident is active and someone must run the room instead of everyone debugging in parallel.
Promo Packet
Assemble a promotion packet that proves sustained impact at the next level, with calibrated scope claims and evidence a committee can verify. Use when you or someone you manage is going up for promotion and you need a case, not a list of tasks.
Postmortem Review Board
Run an org-level board that reviews incident postmortems for quality, promotes cross-cutting fixes, and surfaces trends no single incident reveals. Use when your organization produces enough postmortems that reading them one at a time misses the systemic pattern.
Engineering Manager Role
Operate as an engineering manager who grows people, protects delivery health, hires deliberately, and shields the team from noise. Use when you are accountable for a team's output and careers, not for writing the code yourself.
Perf Calibration
Run a performance calibration meeting so ratings across a group rest on comparable evidence and a consistent bar, not one manager's advocacy. Use when managers are finalizing performance ratings for a team or org and you need consistency and bias control before results are delivered.
Frontend Engineer Role
Operate as a frontend engineer who defends UX quality, enforces performance budgets, and partners with design instead of just closing tickets. Use when building or reviewing a user-facing web feature and you want an engineer's operating discipline, not raw code.
Error Budget Policy
Operate an error budget so reliability decisions follow a written policy instead of an argument: burn-rate alerts, feature freezes, and a clear escalation path. Use when a service has an SLO and you need to decide, without relitigating each incident, when to stop shipping features and fix reliability.