New: Roadmaps ordered paths through our cheat sheets and flashcards, so you always know what to study next.
Explore themSee what's new on GitHubFrom your first 1:1 to a technical roadmap stakeholders trust.
A 15-step learning path. Follow it in order, or jump to what you need.
For developers and tech leads who write code today and are stepping into managing the people who write it tomorrow. Plan on about 10 to 15 weeks at a few hours a week. This path assumes you already work as an engineer and focuses squarely on leading engineers: it skips general first-time-manager ground common to any field (that broader transition lives in the First-Time Manager path) to spend its time on code review culture, technical roadmapping, and hiring engineers instead. By the end you can run a 1:1 and give feedback that actually lands, shape how your team reviews code and manages technical debt, build a technical roadmap you can defend to non-technical stakeholders, and lead your team through an incident without losing their trust.
Expected: hands-on software engineering experience and comfort reading other people's code. Helpful but not required: some exposure to Agile or Scrum team rituals.
You can put these leadership habits to work in your very next conversation, long before delegation, feedback, or strategy build on top of them.
Delegation is what lets you stop being the bottleneck step 1 warned about, freeing your time for the technical direction work later steps cover.
This is where feedback stops feeling like an annual chore and starts becoming the habit every 1:1 from here on depends on; expect to keep circling back to it after hard conversations.
You can hold a 1:1 and give feedback that actually lands, instead of avoiding the conversation. Next up: building a team that trusts you enough to tell you the truth.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Once your team believes disagreement won't cost them, the coaching and conflict-resolution skills ahead actually get used instead of avoided; this shift takes longer to land than any single 1:1, so expect slow progress at first.
Coaching gives you a structure for the safety step 4 created, so your reports solve problems themselves instead of escalating everything to you.
Even a psychologically safe team hits friction, and this step turns the disagreements coaching alone can't resolve into progress instead of grudges.
Now you can zoom out from individual coaching and conflict conversations to shape team norms and rituals that lift the whole group, not just the people you talk to most.
A high-performing team eventually needs new engineers, and this is the step that turns your technical judgment into a hiring process that actually predicts who'll thrive on the team you just built.
You can coach instead of rescue, keep conflict productive, and bring in engineers who make the team stronger; a few minutes of due flashcards on delegation and feedback keeps chapter one fresh while you build on it. Next up: leading the engineering itself, not just the people writing it.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Hiring fills the team, and this is where you start shaping how that team writes software together, turning code review from a bottleneck into the place your engineering standards actually get taught.
The review habits step 9 builds surface the shortcuts your codebase is carrying, and this step gives you the vocabulary to name that debt and get it prioritized instead of quietly ignored.
Debt visibility only helps if you can also weigh the bigger structural trade-offs behind it, and this step gives you the patterns to judge whether your system's shape still fits its growth.
Architecture choices need a home beyond one project, and this step turns what steps 9 through 11 taught you about code, debt, and structure into a roadmap you can defend to people who don't read code.
You can shape how your team reviews code, name technical debt out loud, and turn architecture choices into a roadmap you can explain. Next up: running that roadmap like a business, not just an engineering plan.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
A roadmap only survives contact with the people funding it, so this step gives you the tools to keep non-technical stakeholders bought in instead of blindsided.
Stakeholder trust gets tested hardest during an outage, and this step gives you the playbook to run that moment without the blame that would undo everything psychological safety built back in step 4.
This is the step that pulls delegation, technical roadmapping, and incident response into one habit: stepping back from the next ticket to ask what your team should be doing six months from now.
You can manage stakeholders who don't write code, lead your team through an incident without losing their trust, and think strategically about where the team goes next. This badge marks the shift from writing software to leading the people who write it.
Finish this section to unlock.
+100 XP
Finish every required step, at least 70% of them genuinely done (not skipped), to earn this badge and 500 XP.