Leadership skills for engineers, taught through real stories, real evidence, and a 30-day experiment on your own team.
Built for senior engineers on both leadership tracks: the IC track (toward Staff and Principal Engineer) and the management track (toward Tech Lead and Engineering Manager), including those still deciding between them. Every session shows how each principle applies whether you lead a team of reports or lead technical direction without any.
There are no modules on performance reviews, hiring, or budgets. We teach 8 leadership laws deeply across 4 arcs, each anchored to an industry standard engineers already trust (Google's Project Oxygen, Amazon's Working Backwards, Andy Grove's task-relevant maturity), then made real with a firsthand story from scaling engineering teams at SWVL, Clipboard Health, and Breadfast.
Applicants are screened for technical experience and time spent on a medium-sized team, so every discussion happens between real peers.
Two laws taught deeply per teaching week. Thirteen more laws are offered as optional bonus reading, never assigned and never tested.
The Lid + Priorities
Project Oxygen · Peter Principle · Eisenhower · Pareto · burnout and imposter syndrome
Influence + Connection
Staff pillars · Project Aristotle · SBI feedback · Radical Candor · conflict resolution
Empowerment + Buy-In
Task-relevant maturity · PR/FAQ · DACI · SCQA · managing up and nemawashi
Explosive Growth + Legacy
The Manager's Path · span of control · bus factor · succession planning
Each week starts with a short required reading, so live sessions are spent on discussion and application, not lectures.
The operating rule: no artifact means not done. Lack of evidence is a bad sign, in the course as in engineering.
All dates are placeholders pending cohort confirmation. Every session is on Zoom with breakout rooms and a shared Canva whiteboard.
Read the one-pagers for the Law of the Lid and the Law of Priorities, including the Project Oxygen and Peter Principle summaries.
Counts as done: arrive at Week 1 with one question the reading left you with. Pre-reads are never submitted. Sessions open with a question round and assume you have read.
Tag every block in last week's calendar as Requirement, Return, Reward, or none. Compute the percentage of "none". Write 5 lines on what you would cut. Plus: Week 2 pre-read.
Counts as done: screenshot of the tagged calendar plus the computed percentage submitted. Reflection without the artifact counts as not done.
Map your current team plus 2 adjacent stakeholders. Mark who follows you voluntarily vs by role. Pick the one broken relationship and write a 5-line diagnosis of what connection is missing. Plus: Week 3 pre-read.
Counts as done: the map (Canva frame or photo) plus the 5-line diagnosis submitted.
List 3 things you are hoarding and the honest reason for each. Postmortem one dead proposal against the who-then-why buy-in order. Plus: Week 4 pre-read.
Counts as done: both lists submitted.
Using the fixed one-page template: diagnosis (weakest arc and score), one real named problem on your team, the experiment (one behavior, frequency, start date), evidence to collect, success measure, and the risk that makes you likely to quit plus your counter. Reviewed in your 1:1 mentorship session, never presented.
Counts as done: plan submitted before the case clinic. Plans without a real named problem get sent back.
Run the experiment on your real team, collecting the evidence you committed to. Your 1:1 mentorship session tests and improves the plan during the run. No revision cycle and no presentation: the plan you submitted plus the commitment you stated is the contract.
Counts as done: day-30 reassessment plus a short written retro completed at the end of the run.
Every law block includes an explicit bridge to both tracks. Toggle to see how each of the 8 laws applies to yours.
The full course uses a 24-item self-assessment, taken before the course and again 30 days after. Here are 8 sample items. Rate yourself honestly and find your weakest arc.
Everything in this course runs on evidence. By the end, you'll have produced these from your own real work.
One page per law, pairing each Maxwell law with its industry-standard twin (Project Oxygen, TRM, PR/FAQ, bus factor). Plus 13 bonus laws as optional reading.
Structured worksheets for rating your leadership lid vs technical lid and tagging your calendar as a dataset.
Your real calendar, tagged Requirement / Return / Reward / none, with the "none" percentage computed and a cut list.
A map of who follows you voluntarily vs by role, plus a diagnosis of your one broken relationship.
The 3 things you're hoarding with honest reasons, and a postmortem of one dead proposal.
A one-page designed experiment on your weakest arc: named problem, one behavior, evidence plan, success measure, risk counter.
Your 24-item self-assessment radar across the 4 arcs, pre-course and at day 30. A measurable delta on your gap.
You teach one law back with a story from your own career, graded on a shared 5-dimension rubric, with written feedback.
One 60-minute session: 30 min testing and improving your experiment plan, plus one career question of your choice.
The 8 required pre-reads, one per taught law, in teaching order. Each pairs the law with its industry-standard twin and takes about 15 minutes. Plus the full week-by-week checklist with time estimates.