Engineering Leadership
The non-technical skills that make senior platform engineers effective.
Kubernetes expertise gets you hired. These skills get you promoted — and keep your team healthy.
This is NOT generic management advice. Every module is written specifically for platform engineers, SREs, and DevOps practitioners. The exercises use real scenarios you will face on-call, in postmortems, and in cross-functional meetings.
Modules
Section titled “Modules”| # | Module | Time | What You’ll Learn |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | Incident Command & Crisis Management | 2.5h | ICS roles, severity triage, communication during outages |
| 1.2 | Blameless Postmortems & Root Cause Analysis | 2h | 5 Whys, Ishikawa diagrams, writing effective action items |
| 1.3 | Effective On-Call & Burnout Prevention | 2h | Rotation design, alert fatigue, runbooks, recognizing burnout |
| 1.4 | Architecture Decision Records | 2h | ADR structure, RFC process, writing for different audiences |
| 1.5 | Stakeholder Communication | 2.5h | Translating tech to business, scope negotiation, managing up |
| 1.6 | Mentorship & Multiplying Impact | 2h | Code review as teaching, psychological safety, IC → tech lead |
Total time: ~13 hours
Why These Skills Matter
Section titled “Why These Skills Matter”The most common reason senior engineers plateau is not technical ability — it is the inability to communicate decisions, manage incidents calmly, write documents that influence, and grow the people around them. These modules address exactly that.
Prerequisites
Section titled “Prerequisites”- Some experience working on a team (any engineering role)
- Incidents, postmortems, and on-call modules are useful immediately — even for junior engineers