Full-day workshop:
The Management Lab: A Prototype for Aspiring & New Engineering Managers
Why this workshop?
Leadership isn’t the next level of engineering — it’s a different game. Test drive it in one day.
Most software engineers find the transition to leadership difficult not because they lack technical skill, but because they are moving from a world of predictable logic to a world of human complexity.
This one-day “career prototype” workshop provides a practical framework for leading through culture, communication, and trust. Designed for junior Engineering Managers (EMs) and Individual Contributors (ICs) exploring their next career horizon, this workshop offers a hands-on “test drive” of the management path.
You will obtain a strategic leadership toolkit and the insight to intentionally shape your future professional trajectory.
What will you walk away with
What will you walk away with:
The Psychological Safety Blueprint: A framework to move your team from "polite silence" to high-performance candor.
The Feedback Equations: Simple formulas for giving honest feedback and a better way to receive it, so you can fix performance issues and help your team grow without the awkwardness.
The Coaching Framework: A guide to the "Coaching vs. Mentoring" spectrum, including the "Power Question" bank to help you unlock engineer autonomy.
The Decision-Making Matrix: A system for weighing trade-offs (like speed vs. quality) and the influence skills needed to make your technical decisions stick with stakeholders.
Who is it for?
The Path-Explorer (Senior/Lead IC): You are evaluating how to scale your impact and want to see how your technical strengths translate into leadership.
The New Engineering Manager: You have recently transitioned (0–12 months) and are ready to trade intuition for a structured, professional leadership framework.
The Adaptive Leader: You have naturally stepped into leadership responsibilities and want to intentionally master the role before committing to the official track.
Workshop breakdown
Module 1: The Foundation: Trust & Communication (2 hours)
The Challenge: High-stakes environments where silence or "fear of being wrong" leads to hidden bugs, missed deadlines, and technical debt.
The Toolset: Practical mechanics of psychological safety. We bridge the gap between "being nice" and "being high-performant" using assertive communication and conversational capacity.
The Shift: You move from being a technical expert to the architect of the team environment, ensuring the best ideas, and the most critical risks, always surface early.
Outcome: A team culture where clarity replaces tension and problems are solved before they become crises.
Module 2: Engineering a Growth Mindset: Feedback Systems (2hours)
The Challenge: A recurring "performance ceiling" where the same mistakes happen every sprint because there is no mechanism for collective learning.
The Toolset: A structured framework for continuous feedback. We move away from the "annual review" mindset toward real-time, constructive loops that foster a growth mindset.
The Shift: Moving from "patching bugs" to "debugging the process." You learn to build a system that automates professional growth across the team.
Outcome: A self-correcting team that gets smarter and faster with every project.
Scaling Impact Through Mentorship & Coaching (2 hours)
The Challenge: Being the "single point of failure." If you are the only one who can solve the hard problems, you become the bottleneck, not the leader.
The Toolset: The coaching/mentoring spectrum. Learn when to provide the answer and when to ask the powerful questions that unlock an engineer’s own problem-solving capability.
The Shift: Transitioning from the "Hero" who saves the day to the "Capability Builder" who ensures the team thrives even in your absence.
Outcome: Increased team resilience and time to focus on high-level strategy.
Module 4: The Strategic Edge (Decision Making & Influence) (2 hours)
The Challenge: Stalling out in "analysis paralysis" or losing technical credibility due to indecision, a risk amplified by the rapid shift in the AI landscape. Today’s leaders
The Toolset: Decision-Making Frameworks for high-uncertainty environments. Learn how to weigh trade-offs (speed vs. quality) and build AI-aware roadmaps that balance long-term architecture with the need for rapid innovation.
The Shift: Moving from a "component in the machine" to a strategic partner who can filter the AI hype, communicate technical risks to stakeholders, and exert influence across the organization.
Outcome: The confidence to make hard calls and the influence to see those decisions through to execution.
Who are the trainers?
MAGDA MIU
Engineering Manager
ADOBE
Magda is a Group Engineering Manager with over 15 years of experience in software development and technology leadership. She has a proven track record of scaling engineering organizations, delivering high-impact products, and developing top-performing leaders and managers.
Currently, she is spearheading AI-first initiatives across large-scale enterprise platforms and application ecosystems. Her work focuses on embedding machine learning capabilities and agentic skills to drive intelligent, autonomous experiences for global customers.
A passionate advocate for technology and leadership excellence, Magda also shares her expertise as a blogger, trainer, and public speaker. She is dedicated to inspiring the tech community and shaping the future of digital innovation through strategic mentorship and high-level technical execution.
ALIN MIU
Engineering Manager
AMAZON
Alin is an Engineering Manager with over 15 years of experience building and scaling distributed systems within enterprise and big-tech environments. Having led engineering initiatives for global industry leaders, he has a proven track record of delivering complex, high-availability systems in high-stakes industries such as banking, automotive, and gaming.
His expertise bridges the gap between deep technical execution and strategic business needs. Alin specializes in system design, reliability, and operational excellence, while utilizing Agile, Scrum, and SAFe® frameworks to build high-performing teams and streamlined delivery processes. He focuses on driving technical direction beyond his immediate teams, ensuring execution and stability in the ambiguous, large-scale environments typical of global organizations.
He is dedicated to the future of engineering management: developing sustainable technical strategies, fostering a culture of continuous learning, and empowering senior engineering talent to deliver measurable impact while navigating their own unique professional trajectories.
