Key activities for sustainable engineering team

Incremental forgetting

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Key activities for sustainable engineering team<br>The signal loops that tell managers when to change altitude

Dunya Kirkali<br>Jun 23, 2026

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Photo by Kilimanjaro STUDIOz on Unsplash

Great engineering managers don’t just ship—they build organizations capable of shipping. But that meta-skill is rarely named, let alone taught.<br>Our book Engineering Manager’s Compass focuses on the unspoken rules of the role: how to read organizational structures, how to turn messy metrics into real decisions, and how to build teams that deliver without you holding everything together.<br>Get the book

As a manager, your altitude changes.<br>Sometimes you need to fly high: looking at strategy, direction, and the broader system around the team. Sometimes you need to fly low: joining the details, removing friction, and helping the team through turbulence. The hard part is knowing when to change altitude.<br>When flying high, you might not be able to be present at every standup, every planning session, or every retrospective. Similarly when flying low, you might not be able to attend every sync, every ops review, or every business review. This is why it is important to understand the key activities that you need to be involved in, in order to ensure that you are present.<br>It’s all about being able to get the right signals to understand when to change your altitude. People often confuse these activities with Scrum ceremonies, but they are not. Scrum is one of many frameworks which often get used to manage software development teams. But it is by no means the only one.<br>Scrum ceremonies are one possible implementation but the real thing you need is a reliable signal. Let’s categorize these key activities into three groups:<br>Internal : These activities are focused on the team and their work.

Boundary : These activities are focused on the boundaries of the team and how they interact with the rest of the organization.

External : These activities are focused on the external environment and how it affects the team.

Some examples for internal activities are: standups, retrospectives, and planning sessions. Examples for boundary activities are: syncs with other teams, ops reviews, and business reviews, and examples for external activities are: customer feedback sessions, market research, and industry conferences.<br>Now let’s have a look at each of these categories in more detail.<br>Internal activities

Synchronization meetings

These are that set of activities that will be your probe to understand when it is time to fly low. As an engineering manager, you for sure will not be able to know all the details of your team’s work. However, you should be able to get a fair understanding by attending these activities.<br>A common way of working in software engineering is to have a form of synchronization session, where the team members share what they are working on, what they have done, and what they plan to do next. But most importantly, whether or not there is anything blocking them from delivering their work.<br>This is the signal that you are looking for.<br>In some cases, such synchronizations happen on a daily basis (standups), in others it happens on a weekly basis. When there is more turbulence in the team, it is often a good idea to increase the cadence of these meetings. You could classify 1:1s as a subcategory of such meetings.<br>Such syncs could happen synchronously where all attendees might gather together, but also asynchronously, where the attendees might either be leveraging a bot to which they send their updates or a document where they append it. These meetings can be held in person, over video calls, or through chat tools.<br>Regardless of the format and the cadence, these meetings are essential for you to understand what the momentum of your team is . If you notice that the team is struggling to deliver, you have your signal to fly low.<br>Reflections

Ellen Ullman once wrote:<br>Code and forget, code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.

Reflections are a key activity for any team, where the team will reflect on their work and identify areas for improvement. It is a great opportunity for you to understand what structural issues the team is facing, and what could be done to improve the team’s way-of-working.<br>One might even argue that this is the most important activity for you as a manager. Ultimately, a team that does not reflect on their work and does not identify areas for improvement, is doomed to incrementally forget and repeat the same mistakes over and over again.<br>Similar to synchronization meetings, reflections can also be held in various formats and cadences. They can be held at a regular cadence or it could also be done after a success or failure event. What ultimately matters is that you’re able to get good insights into how your team is evolving. And even more importantly, following up on the actions that the team...