The outcomes most engineering managers stumble into by luck or by decade, taught here, 1:1, on your real team.
Be the manager leadership bets on
A coach who's done it. A fieldbook you apply to your real team. And a method that makes the invisible parts of the job visible. 60-min live + self-paced work, for 6 weeks. No lectures, no "community," no templates-as-substitute-for-thinking.
Most EMs were promoted for being the person the team leaned on. That's how you got here, and the instinct still earns its keep. The shape of the job, though, has changed.
At the next altitude, you stop being the single point of good judgement and start building the team that produces it without you. People development moves from a 1:1 hygiene task to the real work. Delivery stops running through your shoulders. And the invisible operating system you've been holding together by hand becomes something you can actually see, name and design.
The 3 Guarantees are your map to that altitude. Three concrete outcomes your team, your stakeholders, and your own manager all quietly grade you on - and the three dimensions of a job most EMs run for years without ever seeing the whole shape of.
These quiet thoughts run management in stealth. Naming yours is the easiest win you'll have all year. Outgrowing it on purpose is what the program is for.
pick a confession to read it.
“I went from being the best in the room to not knowing what my job even is. Nobody prepared me for this.”
Capable EMs outgrow the instinct to step in. The next altitude is designing a team that doesn't wait for you.
“I'm in every escalation, every outage, every hard call. I keep telling myself I'll delegate next sprint. I never do.”
You're not saving the team. You're the bottleneck the team is too polite to name.
“I've been meaning to give this feedback for weeks. Every time I start the sentence in my head, I hear how it sounds, and I stop.”
The feedback you're sitting on has a cost. Your silence isn't protecting them. It's deciding for them.
“My boss needs this by Friday. I don't have time to explain the why to the team, I just need them to execute.”
Your team doesn't need a messenger. Your leadership doesn't need "yes" people. Be the manager they both trust.
“I had a real vision for how this team could work. Somewhere along the way I stopped fighting for it. Now I just sit in meetings and feel powerless.”
You didn't lose the vision. You just stopped building the conditions for it. That part is learnable.
You learn to hold them in tension.
Drag the dot. Lean toward any one and the trade-off you're making appears. Release to see what you'd build instead.
drag the dot — release to re-center
All three holding — the job, done.
Your team ships. Stakeholders trust your word. Surprises become rare - because clarity removes chaos from the pipeline, not because you push the team harder.
Engineers grow visibly better under your leadership. High performers actively want in. You stop hiring your way out of people problems - you grow your way out.
Technical debt is managed. Processes scale. Team dynamics are healthy. Some chaos is inherited - but it's yours to manage. Make the invisible visible.
Self-paced videos and workbooks build the mental model. A weekly 60-minute live session does the work videos can't. By Week 3, your coach knows your team well enough to keep you honest long after the program ends.
The Standard. A bar you set, together. A discovery call, then a shared commitment spoken aloud - the agreement that binds you and your coach.
The Map. Three guarantees, in plain sight. Nobody told you you were signing them - you'll spot them everywhere by Monday.
Predictable Delivery. Clarity over effort. Why smart teams still miss dates - and how to stop being the last line of defence.
Talent Multiplication. Grow your way out. The invisible ceiling on every team - and the conversation that breaks it.
System Health. Own what's already running you. The invisible system you've been managing around - finally visible, finally yours to design.
The Inner Work. The tensions you've been hiding. The trade-offs that quietly shape every call you make - turned into deliberate choices.
Your Frame. Distilled, declared, defensible. Your leadership foundations, named at last - clear, consistent throughout your career.
The frameworks are evidence. The workbook is the work. What you leave with is something more durable - three capabilities, built on your real material, that travel with you across every team you ever lead.
I've run engineering teams across Contentful, Taxfix and Klara - through scale changes, reorgs, founding moments, and the stretches where delivery and talent and systems all compete for the same afternoon.
I've learned the job the way most of us learn it: late, alone, and on people who deserved better. This program is the map I wish someone had drawn for me - the one that turns the job from something you hold together by hand into something you can actually see, name and design.
I coach it the way I wish I'd been coached: small room, real work, honest conversation. No lectures.
Engagements are limited to a handful at a time, filled by short application. The bar is low for credentials and high for honesty - the work only produces its outcomes for managers willing to act on what the program reveals about themselves.
No pitch calls, no funnel. You send a short application. If it looks like a fit, I reply with a 20-minute conversation to make sure the program earns its place in your schedule.
If it doesn't fit - I'll say that too, and usually point you at something better.
I'll reach out within the next 48 hours. If urgent — drop an email to contact@chirantanrajhans.com.
On paper: Engineering Managers managing teams of 3–15 engineers. The baseline is typically 1–5 years in the role, but frankly, tenure is a trap. I've seen decade-deep veteran EMs still white-knuckling their way through sprints because they never consciously unlearned their IC habits.
In reality: It's for the manager who is currently functioning as their team's most expensive piece of duct tape.
You were promoted because you were an exceptional engineer who reliably delivered. But the brute-force execution that made you a great IC is exactly what's trapping you as a manager. You've become the ultimate safety net - catching dropped balls, filtering the noise, and shielding your team from organizational chaos, entirely at the cost of your own capacity.
This program is for the manager - whether in year one or year ten - who has held things together through sheer force of will, but realizes surviving isn't scaling. It's for the leader ready to stop playing firefighter, step out of the micro-details, and build the macro-intuition required to actually compound their impact.
(If you're a Director or VP looking to enroll your managers to build this capability across your org, let's have a separate conversation.)
Let's go off-script. If you've read this far, you aren't looking for another list of frameworks or PDF templates. You're looking for proof that the bleeding can actually stop.
Right now, you are likely paying for your team's delivery with your own hidden overtime. You might be logged off, but your brain is still untangling tomorrow's chaotic release or bracing for the next fire.
What you actually leave this program with is operational control - and the career leverage that comes with it. The team diagnostics, the tension statements, and the leadership philosophy are just the mechanics.
The real return on your investment is the shift from a reactive bottleneck to a systemic leader. When your team no longer relies on you to manually hold everything together, you stop just surviving your current role and build the capacity for your next career leap. You leave with the intuition to trust the machine you've built, the clarity to stop doing your team's job for them, and the leverage to finally own your time and your trajectory.
Both, deliberately. A static course alone won't change ingrained habits, and coaching without a solid foundation often devolves into just venting about the week's fires.
The Self-Paced Content: This provides the new lenses and tools you need to view your team's dynamics from a different altitude. It gives you the foundational concepts to shift your perspective from micro-execution to macro-intuition.
The Live Sessions: This is where the actual unlearning happens. The live environment does the work that asynchronous content simply can't: directly naming the real, messy tensions you're sitting on right now.
You aren't doing this in a vacuum. You'll be dissecting these realities with a coach who has lived them, while you keep operating inside your real team. We use the self-paced tools to shift your perspective, and the live coaching to actually apply it to your current reality.
I know the irony: you're looking at this program to get your time back, but you have to find the time to take it first. If your calendar is already stretched thin, adding a structured 1:1 program to your plate probably sounds daunting.
Here are the mechanics: One 60-minute live session a week. That is your only fixed calendar block. The rest is self-paced video and workbook content designed to flex around your existing commitments.
Mind you, this isn't a second job. The reflection and the actual work happen inside your team, not on top of it. You aren't stepping away from your desk to study management in a vacuum. Instead, you are applying new lenses to view your daily context from a different altitude, using practical tools to shift how you operate in real-time.
You are investing a couple of hours a week to build the machine that buys your time back permanently.
If you wait for the chaos to clear, you will never take this program. Applying new leadership lenses to hypothetical, calm scenarios is practically useless. This program is designed to use your current crisis as the curriculum. You bring your actual, messy team tensions into the room, and we use the tools to dissect them in real-time. Don't wait for the fire to burn out; learn how to build the firebreak now.
The live sessions are where the deepest unlearning happens, so attendance is expected. However, reality happens - production goes down, escalations occur. Every session is recorded so you can revisit any moment that lands. If you know in advance you will miss more than one session, it is best to hold off and apply when your calendar is clearer.
Because, frankly, not everyone is ready for this.
It is easy to vent about being overwhelmed. It is entirely different to do the uncomfortable work of unlearning the brute-force habits that got you promoted in the first place. Building macro-intuition means dropping the ego of being your team's "hero", stepping out of the micro-details, and letting a few small fires burn so you can finally build the machine that puts them out permanently. If a room is filled with managers just looking for a quick template to bandage a broken sprint, nobody makes the leap.
The short application isn't a gate for your technical pedigree; it's a gut-check. It's there to make sure that when you sit down for our first session, you aren't just looking for sympathy for your calendar. You are ready to let go of the duct tape and step up.
Friends sympathize. Books generalize. Neither will sit with you on a Tuesday afternoon, look at your actual team, and tell you what they see.
Friends share your blind spots. Books were written for a manager who isn't you. A 1:1 coach who has done this work spends an hour a week in the room with your real situation, your release, your skip-level, the engineer you can't quite read. You leave with operating moves, not summaries.
Tuition is €1,500 for the first 10 engagements of 2026, then €3,000. The program runs over 6 weeks. Most participants expense this through their company's L&D budget. I provide the invoice and a short justification letter for your manager. If budget is a hard blocker, say so in your application and we'll talk.
"Become the manager leadership bets on."
Apply