Templates
Copy, paste, adapt. These exist to lower the cost of doing the right thing consistently — not to be filled out for their own sake.
Daily & Weekly
The rhythm-keepers — small, recurring, easy to skip and costly when skipped.
1:1 Running Doc
One shared doc per direct report, appended over time — not a fresh doc each week. Their agenda first. Growth conversation once a quarter as a distinct pass. If you're doing more than 60% of the talking, you're doing it wrong.
Weekly Review
Friday afternoon. 30 minutes maximum. The point is not comprehensive — the point is honest. If you skip a section, that's information.
Decision Log Entry
One entry per non-trivial decision. Cheap to write, expensive not to have. The revisit date is what makes this actually valuable — without it, this is just journaling.
Onboarding & Transitions
For stepping into a role, a team, or a season of change.
Self-Introduction One-Pager
For sharing with a new team in your first week. Written to be read, not presented. Human details matter — they signal you're a person before you're a title. Skip the resume recap; frame your experience by what you learned, not what you shipped.
Listening Tour Question Set
Use during Phase 2 (Days 8-30). 30-45 minute conversations across the team and adjacent teams. Same core questions to each person — themes emerge by conversation 8 or 10. Track responses in a single running doc.
What to Expect from Me (Shareable)
The public-facing version. Share with a new team in week one or two, either in a doc or as part of your intro. Every commitment here should be one you actually keep. Cut any you can't defend.
Team Operating Plan
Written during Phase 4 (Days 61-90). Socialized with peers and manager before announcing to the team. Kept to two pages. The "what we're stopping" section is not optional — it forces prioritization to be honest.
Engineering Rituals
The technical-team rituals that keep quality and context from decaying.
RFC / Design Doc Template
For non-trivial technical decisions — anything cross-team, anything hard to reverse, anything you'll want to remember why you did in a year. Async review. Time-boxed. The alternatives section is required because "we chose X" is only useful if we can see what X beat.
Postmortem Template
Blameless. The system allowed the failure — that is the frame, always. Action items have owners and dates, or they are wishes. The lessons section is broader than the actions and often more valuable.
On-Call Handoff
15-minute weekly ritual. Written down, always — verbal handoffs get lost. The outgoing engineer runs it. The incoming engineer asks questions.
Tech Radar
A living doc, not a template you fill once. Categorizes technologies by our stance on them so we're not re-litigating solved decisions. Reviewed quarterly. When you add an entry, add the date — otherwise you can't tell six months from now whether "adopt Postgres" was decided last week or three years ago.