Technical Leadership Skills for Engineering Managers Training Course
| Course code | SD-LD-044 |
|---|---|
| Duration | 5 days |
| Level | Intermediate to Advanced |
| Category | Leadership Development |
| Delivery | Classroom or live online |
| Language | English |
| Certificate | Certificate of completion |
Course overview
Engineering managers are expected to make sound technical decisions while creating the conditions for teams to deliver reliable software, retire risk, and meet business commitments. The difficult work is rarely assigning tickets: it is clarifying architecture trade-offs, translating technical uncertainty for executives, intervening when delivery signals deteriorate, and developing senior engineers without becoming the team’s bottleneck. This course equips managers to lead technical work with enough engineering depth to challenge assumptions, set direction, and protect sustainable delivery.
Participants learn to establish an engineering operating model that connects strategy, architecture, delivery, reliability, and talent. They practise using DORA metrics and service indicators to diagnose delivery issues; building technology roadmaps that expose dependencies and risk; running architecture decision records (ADRs); facilitating technical design reviews; and prioritising technical debt alongside product work. The course also develops practical management skills for delegation, engineering career conversations, incident leadership, cross-functional negotiation, and evidence-based communication with product, security, and executive stakeholders.
Teaching combines instructor-led technical leadership frameworks with engineering-management case studies, Jira-based planning exercises, GitHub workflow scenarios, and peer critique of real decision documents. Throughout the week, participants build a Technical Leadership Operating Plan for a team or department: a practical pack containing a team charter, metrics dashboard design, decision-rights map, engineering roadmap, technical debt prioritisation model, and 90-day implementation plan. This gives participants a defensible management approach they can use immediately with their own teams.
The course is designed for experienced engineers moving into management, current engineering managers, and technical leaders responsible for software, platforms, data, infrastructure, or product engineering teams.
Course objectives
By the end of this course, participants will be able to:
- Construct an engineering operating model that defines team purpose, decision rights, interfaces, and delivery cadences
- Interpret DORA metrics, service-level indicators, and flow data to diagnose delivery and reliability constraints
- Create a technology roadmap that links business outcomes, architectural dependencies, risks, and investment decisions
- Facilitate architecture decision reviews using ADRs, explicit trade-off criteria, and documented decision ownership
- Prioritise technical debt with a risk-versus-value model that supports product and engineering investment decisions
- Run blameless incident reviews that identify contributing conditions, corrective actions, and accountable follow-through
- Delegate technical ownership through role clarity, coaching conversations, and measurable engineering expectations
- Present technical risk, delivery forecasts, and architecture trade-offs to non-technical executives using decision-ready narratives
Benefits of attending
For you
- Gain a repeatable way to lead technical decisions without reverting to hands-on control of every solution
- Build credible executive communication through structured technology roadmaps, risk narratives, and delivery evidence
- Use engineering metrics to distinguish capacity problems, workflow bottlenecks, quality issues, and reliability risks
- Lead stronger architecture and incident conversations through ADRs, design-review practices, and blameless review methods
- Leave with a 90-day technical leadership plan that supports progression into senior engineering management roles
For your organisation
- Improve the quality and traceability of technical decisions through documented trade-offs, ownership, and architecture decision records
- Reduce delivery uncertainty by using DORA and flow measures to identify bottlenecks before commitments are missed
- Make technical debt investment decisions more transparent by connecting remediation work to risk, cost, and product outcomes
- Strengthen incident learning by replacing blame-focused reviews with corrective actions and measurable follow-through
- Create more consistent engineering management practices across teams, product partners, and senior stakeholders
Target competencies
Who should attend
- Engineering Managers — who must balance people leadership, architecture decisions, delivery performance, and stakeholder expectations
- Software Development Managers — who lead application teams and need repeatable methods for improving delivery and reliability
- Technical Leads moving into management — who need to shift from individual problem-solving to leading technical systems and people
- Platform and Infrastructure Managers — who must communicate reliability, capacity, and operational risk in business terms
- Data Engineering Managers — who coordinate complex technical dependencies, data quality priorities, and cross-functional delivery
- Heads of Engineering — who need a consistent operating model for multiple teams, managers, and technical investment decisions
Requirements and prerequisites
Participants should have at least three years of professional experience in software engineering, platform engineering, data engineering, infrastructure, or a closely related technical discipline, plus current or recent responsibility for leading people, projects, or technical work. Familiarity with Agile delivery concepts, backlogs, pull requests, production incidents, and basic software architecture terminology is assumed. Participants should be able to discuss a real team, service, or delivery challenge from their workplace. No coding assessment, formal computer science degree, MBA, enterprise architecture certification, or prior experience with DORA metrics is required.
Training methodology
The programme uses short instructor-led sessions to introduce engineering-management models, followed by applied work on realistic team scenarios. Participants analyse Jira delivery data, draft ADRs from competing architecture options, run design-review and incident-review simulations, and practise executive briefings with peer feedback. Small-group workshops compare decisions across product, platform, and reliability contexts rather than treating management as a generic soft-skill topic. Each day adds material to an individual Technical Leadership Operating Plan, which is reviewed on the final day and converted into a workplace implementation sequence.
Course outline
Day 1: The engineering manager’s operating system
- Defining the engineering manager role across people, technology, delivery, and business outcomes
- Creating team charters with mission, boundaries, service ownership, and success measures
- Applying Team Topologies concepts to team interaction modes and cognitive load
- Mapping decision rights with RAPID and technical ownership boundaries
- Establishing engineering cadences for planning, design review, operational review, and retrospectives
- Distinguishing management accountability from staff engineer and tech lead responsibilities
- Using stakeholder maps to identify product, security, operations, and executive dependencies
Workshop: Participants create a team operating model and decision-rights map for a case-study engineering group, identifying unclear ownership and escalation paths.
Day 2: Leading delivery with engineering evidence
- Interpreting DORA metrics: deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and time to restore service
- Using Jira flow metrics to examine work in progress, cycle time, blocked work, and throughput
- Separating output metrics from outcome measures and customer-impact indicators
- Forecasting delivery with probabilistic ranges, historical throughput, and dependency assumptions
- Diagnosing bottlenecks across discovery, development, review, testing, release, and production support
- Designing dashboards that prevent metric gaming and support management action
- Running delivery reviews focused on constraints, risks, decisions, and commitments
Workshop: Participants analyse a simulated Jira dataset, produce a delivery diagnosis, and recommend three interventions supported by metric evidence.
Day 3: Technical direction, architecture, and debt
- Translating product strategy into technical capability maps and investment themes
- Building technology roadmaps with milestones, dependencies, assumptions, and risk exposure
- Writing architecture decision records with context, options, consequences, and decision owners
- Facilitating design reviews using quality attributes, non-functional requirements, and trade-off criteria
- Prioritising technical debt using impact, likelihood, cost of delay, and remediation effort
- Managing build-versus-buy decisions and vendor technology dependencies
- Communicating architectural runway and platform investment to product and finance stakeholders
Workshop: Participants write an ADR and build a prioritised technical debt investment case for a legacy-service modernisation scenario.
Day 4: Reliability, incidents, and technical people leadership
- Setting service-level indicators, service-level objectives, and error budgets
- Leading incident command, stakeholder updates, escalation decisions, and recovery coordination
- Conducting blameless post-incident reviews with contributing factors and corrective actions
- Turning recurring operational pain into reliability engineering and roadmap priorities
- Delegating technical ownership through explicit outcomes, guardrails, and review points
- Coaching senior engineers through design influence, technical judgement, and stakeholder conflict
- Managing performance concerns where technical quality, collaboration, or delivery behaviour is affected
Workshop: Participants lead a simulated production incident and produce a post-incident review with corrective actions, owners, and due dates.
Day 5: Executive influence and the 90-day leadership plan
- Framing technical proposals as business decisions with options, consequences, and recommendations
- Communicating uncertainty, delivery confidence, and technical risk without false precision
- Negotiating scope, sequencing, capacity, and quality trade-offs with product leadership
- Preparing concise engineering health reviews for executives and boards
- Aligning hiring, capability development, and succession planning with technical strategy
- Creating a 90-day implementation plan with leading indicators and review checkpoints
- Establishing peer accountability for post-course technical leadership actions
Workshop: Participants present their Technical Leadership Operating Plan to a mock executive panel and leave with a refined 90-day implementation roadmap.
Tools & standards covered
Jira Software, GitHub, Miro, DORA Metrics
A typical training day
| 08:30 – 10:30 | First session |
| 10:30 – 10:45 | Refreshment break |
| 10:45 – 12:30 | Second session |
| 12:30 – 13:30 | Lunch and networking |
| 13:30 – 15:00 | Third session |
| 15:00 – 15:15 | Refreshment break |
| 15:15 – 16:30 | Workshop and daily review |
Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.
What the fee includes
- Instruction by a practitioner facilitator
- Full course workbook and materials
- Exercise files, templates and case studies
- Certificate of completion
- Refreshments and lunch (classroom deliveries)
- Post-course application plan
- Facilitator follow-up on request
- Group rates from five participants
How you can take this course
Classroom
Scheduled sessions in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kigali, Dar es Salaam, Dubai and Cape Town.
Live online
The same facilitator and materials, delivered live for distributed teams and individuals.
In-house
Delivered privately for your team, at your offices or a venue of your choice, tailored to your context. Request a proposal.
Certification
Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.
Frequently asked questions
Upcoming sessions
New dates are being scheduled. Ask us about the next session or an in-house delivery for your team.
Ask about datesGroup of 5+?
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