Engineering Manager Coaching Program

Your managers are struggling.
That's costing you more
than you think.

A 6-week coaching program that builds the leadership instincts your engineering managers were never taught — so your teams ship reliably, your talent stays, and you stop firefighting problems that shouldn't reach you.

2–3×
Salary cost of manager-driven
attrition per engineer lost
6
Weeks to a measurably
different manager
0
Generic frameworks — every
cohort is live, coached, real

"Your best engineers are being managed by someone who never understood what their job even is."

See if this fits your team →
The Real Cost

A struggling manager doesn't just struggle. They create a blast radius.

🔥
Delivery drag
Unclear priorities. Missed commitments. You're pulled into every escalation that a competent manager would have caught.
🧲
Talent bleed
Your best engineers leave managers, not companies. You lose the people you can least afford to lose — quietly, avoidably.
Your time, drained
You spend your most expensive hours handling problems that belong one level below. Multiply that by every struggling EM on your team.
📉
Morale corrosion
Underperformance tolerated. Feedback avoided. Culture drifts sideways while the manager hopes things will work themselves out.
🔄
The hero trap
Managers who mistake their own output for team output. They build bottlenecks, not systems. Every improvement requires them personally.
📊
Forecasts you can't trust
When a manager doesn't understand delivery mechanics, your roadmap estimates become guesses. Stakeholder trust erodes with every miss.

They didn't fail to lead. They were never shown how.

— The gap every engineering leader inherits
The Root Cause

The job nobody described is still the same job.

Engineering management isn't hard because your managers are weak. It's hard because the transition from IC to EM is almost never supported. They were excellent engineers. They got promoted. And then they were left to figure it out.

The result: they manage the way they were managed, firefight what's urgent, avoid what's uncomfortable, and slowly become a bottleneck instead of a multiplier.

The 3 Guarantees gives them the mental model, the tools, and the language for the job they're actually doing — so you stop inheriting problems that should have been solved one level down.

Reactive → Intentional
Managing by instinct Reactive. Inconsistent. Whatever worked last time, regardless of context.
Identity still as IC Slides back into code. Builds the feature instead of building the team that builds features.
Confusing motion with progress Lots of effort, little clarity. Can't distinguish busyness from delivery.
Managing with a system Predictable delivery through clarity — not harder pushing.
Identity as a multiplier Their job is to build the system that delivers — not be it.
Making the invisible visible Culture, process, dysfunction — proactively managed before they become your problem.
The Program

Three things your managers will learn to guarantee.

Guarantee 01
Predictable Delivery
Their team ships reliably. Not because they push harder — because clarity removes chaos from the pipeline.
What you see today
  • Missed commitments with vague explanations
  • Scope creep nobody caught until it was late
  • Priorities that shift every week
  • You're the last line of defence on delivery
What changes
  • Stakeholder trust in team commitments
  • Roadmap clarity that cascades down
  • Execution quality without escalation
  • Surprises become rare, not routine
Guarantee 02
Talent Multiplication
The people around them grow. You can't hire your way out of people chaos — you have to grow your way out.
What you see today
  • Strong ICs leaving for "growth opportunities"
  • Underperformance tolerated indefinitely
  • Feedback so vague it changes nothing
  • You're handling the hard conversations
What changes
  • Engineers who grow faster under this manager
  • Performance issues surfaced and resolved
  • Delegation that actually develops people
  • High performers who want to join the team
Guarantee 03
System Health
The org around them doesn't decay. Some chaos is inherited — but it's theirs to manage. Make the invisible visible.
What you see today
  • Culture drifting sideways unnoticed
  • Cross-team friction that festers
  • Processes that never get fixed, just worked around
  • Heroes required for basic operation
What changes
  • Team dynamics proactively managed
  • Collaboration that doesn't require your intervention
  • Decisions made at the right level
  • A system that runs without heroes
After 6 Weeks

What your managers will say. What your org will feel.

The Accidental Manager
"I was the best engineer so they made me the manager."
"I am not the solution — I build the system that is."
The Heroic Firefighter
"If I don't fix it, nobody will."
"My job isn't to fix it myself. It's to build a team that doesn't need me to."
The People Pleaser
"I need my team to like me."
"A hard conversation now saves a much harder one later."
The Upward Manager
"I just need to hit the numbers my boss wants."
"My team doesn't need me to repeat what leadership said. They need me to make it mean something."
The Lost Idealist
"I don't know what I'm doing anymore."
"Clarity is not given. It's built — and that's the job."
"The real change isn't in the content. It's in the moment they take it back to their team and it just works."
— Program Design Philosophy
How It Works

Six weeks. Live cohort. Real change.

Not a course library they'll never finish. Not a seminar they forget by Monday. A structured 6-week program with self-paced content, a weekly live group session, and workbook exercises designed to surface and replace the specific limiting beliefs holding your managers back.

6
Weeks
6
Live sessions
Modules

Modular design means irrelevant content gets removed. You can sponsor individual managers or a full cohort. Program can be customised to your team's specific gap — delivery, people, or systems.

Hook
The Incident Report
Name the chaos. Every EM gets the nod in minute one.
Week 1
The Job Nobody Described
Reveal the 3 Guarantees. Here is your map.
Week 2
Follow the Delivery Trail
Predictable Delivery — clarity over effort.
Week 3
Follow the People Trail
Talent Multiplication — grow your way out.
Week 4
Follow the Structural Trail
System Health — make the invisible visible.
Week 5
Turn the Lens on Yourself
Your manager's personal operating system.
Week 6
The Verdict
Integration. Personal philosophy. The unspoken graduation.

You already know which manager you're thinking of. Start there.

Talk about your team →
Your Coach
CR
Chirantan Rajhans
Senior Engineering Leader · Berlin · 18+ Years in Tech

Chirantan brings 18+ years of engineering leadership experience — from scaling engineering organisations at Klara and Contentful to mentoring managers across the globe on Plato, one of the world's leading engineering leadership platforms.

What sets this program apart isn't frameworks or slides. It's the rare combination of technical depth and the ability to guide managers toward the kind of breakthroughs that fundamentally change how they lead — not just what they do on Monday.

His managers don't just get better. They see themselves differently.

Klara
Contentful
Plato Mentor
18+ Years
Berlin
What Leaders Say
Testimonial
Three months after the program, the escalations that used to land on my desk stopped coming. That's not a coincidence.
VP Engineering · SaaS Scale-up · Berlin
Testimonial
I sponsored two managers. Six weeks later, both had difficult conversations they'd been avoiding for months. The team noticed.
CTO · Series B · 60-person Engineering Org
Testimonial
What I appreciated was the personalisation. This wasn't a course. It was a mirror — one that my manager couldn't look away from.
Engineering Director · Enterprise Tech · Remote
Let's Talk

Tell me about your team. I'll tell you if this fits.

No decks. No sales calls. A short conversation to understand your managers' specific challenges and whether this program is the right intervention.

Response within 48 hours
Program can be tailored per individual or full cohort
Company-sponsored cohorts handled with psychological safety in mind
If it's not the right fit, I'll tell you that too
Intake Form — The 3 Guarantees
No commitment. No pitch deck. Just an honest conversation.