Engineering Leadership Playbook

A practical, copy-pastable operating system for healthy, high-performing engineering teams in remote-first SaaS environments.

What this is

This playbook is an operating system for engineering leadership. It's opinionated, practical, and designed to be used—not debated.

Focus areas:

• Team operations — Cadences, rituals, working agreements, async communication
• People growth — 1:1s, feedback, growth plans, hiring, performance management
• Delivery — Planning, quality, incident response, technical debt, metrics
• Culture — DEI strategy, engineering culture, psychological safety
• Platform — Reliability practices, scalability, platform themes
• Leadership — Development paths, decision-making, vision and strategy

Who it's for:

• Engineering Managers
• Tech Leads
• Staff+ Engineers
• Anyone building or leading engineering teams

What makes it different:

Every document answers six questions:

1. What problem does this solve?
2. When should I use this—and when not?
3. Who owns this, and what are their responsibilities?
4. What does "good" look like in practice?
5. What usually goes wrong?
6. What can I copy-paste and use today?

Quick start

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+ (for MkDocs)
• Node.js 18+ (for linting and formatting)
• Git

Clone and setup

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/dreamingechoes/engineering-leadership-playbook.git
cd engineering-leadership-playbook

# Create and activate a Python virtual environment
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate

# Install Python dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Install Node.js dependencies (for linting)
npm install

Run locally

# Activate virtual environment (if not already active)
source .venv/bin/activate

# Start the development server
mkdocs serve

# Open http://127.0.0.1:8000 in your browser

Build for production

# Build the static site
mkdocs build

# Output will be in the ./site directory

Project structure

.
├── docs/                   # All documentation content
│   ├── index.md            # Home page
│   ├── principles/         # Core principles, decision-making, ethics
│   ├── team-ops/           # Cadence, rituals, working agreements
│   ├── people/             # 1:1s, feedback, hiring, growth
│   ├── delivery/           # Planning, quality, incidents, tech debt
│   ├── platform/           # Reliability, scalability, themes
│   ├── metrics/            # Engineering and team health metrics
│   ├── culture/            # DEI, engineering culture
│   ├── collaboration/      # Working with Product, Design
│   ├── crisis/             # Crisis management, outage comms
│   ├── scaling/            # Scaling teams and systems
│   ├── leadership/         # Leadership development
│   ├── case-studies/       # Real-world examples
│   └── resources/          # Templates and tools
├── src/
│   └── overrides/          # Theme customizations
├── mkdocs.yml              # MkDocs configuration
├── requirements.txt        # Python dependencies
└── package.json            # Node.js dependencies (linting)

Available commands

Python (MkDocs)

mkdocs serve              # Start development server
mkdocs build              # Build static site
mkdocs gh-deploy --force  # Deploy to GitHub Pages

Node.js (Quality)

npm run lint              # Run all linters
npm run lint:md           # Lint markdown files
npm run lint:md:fix       # Fix markdown issues
npm run lint:format       # Check formatting
npm run format            # Format all files

Templates

Ready-to-use templates are available in /docs/resources/:

• 1:1 Agenda
• Retro Template
• Postmortem Template
• ADR Template
• Growth Plan Template
• Hiring Scorecard
• Working Agreement
• Runbook Template
• Outage Comms Template
• Roadmap Review Template
• Conflict Resolution Template

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please:

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature/improvement)
3. Run linting before committing (npm run lint and npm run lint:md:fix)
4. Submit a pull request

License

• Code and templates: MIT License
• Content: CC BY 4.0 — Attribute "Iván González Sáiz" with a link to this repository

About

Created by Iván González Sáiz — Engineering Manager / Team Lead focused on remote-first SaaS teams.

• 🌐 Website: dreamingecho.es
• 💼 LinkedIn: ivan-gonzalez-saiz
• 🦋 Bluesky: @dreamingechoes.bsky.social
• 📧 Email: hi@dreamingecho.es