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The EngOS Audit: What’s broken in your team’s operating system?
A group poll to quickly uncover your eng team’s biggest challenges.
At , we’ve had the privilege of talking to thousands of engineering leaders about how they run their teams. It’s been fascinating to get a peek at each team’s “EngOS” — the operating system that dictates how decisions are made, how work gets done, and how people work together. And while every EngOS is unique, they all share one thing in common —they’re all broken in some way. There’s always room to improve your team.
The best engineering leaders understand this, and regularly set aside time with their team to figure out the most painful problems. The good news? Fixing problems can be surprisingly easy. The hard part is identifying your biggest problems in the first place. You see, team problems are like mold. If left in the dark, they grow. Shining a light on them is one of the most effective cures.
To help you do that, we’re sharing this EngOS Audit template. It’s a group poll to quickly uncover your engineering team’s biggest challenges. The template is simple and ready to use. We’ve even prefilled it with common pain points that top engineering teams face.
Run the EngOS audit with your own team.
To get started, copy the template and follow the 5 steps below.
Copy the template
Step 1: Prep the audit
Moderator: Before the audit meeting, set up your audit in 4 easy steps.
Copy the template
Clear the sample data
Step 2: Choose EngOS categories to include
The EngOS is divided into 4 areas:
Each area is further split into multiple categories, fourteen in total:
And each category is further split into multiple modules, unique to every company:
Choose which categories to include in your audit by checking the toggles below.
Include?
Category
Example topics
Planning
e.g. Our planning process, including top down guidance, bottom-up goal setting, dependency tracking, etc.
Team Collaboration
e.g. How we work together, including sharing knowledge, meetings, project tracking, training, etc.
Decision Making
e.g. How we make decisions, how long it takes us to make decisions, whether our decisions are “sticky”, etc.
Team Formation
e.g. How we allocate headcount, our hiring process, our reporting structures, etc.
Team Management
e.g. How we onboard new hires, our 1:1 meetings, mentorship, training, etc.
Team Calibration
e.g. Our performance management process, succession plans for critical roles, compensation, etc.
Engineering Design
e.g. The state of our engineering wiki, design process, review process, etc.
Engineering Productivity
e.g. How we manage tech debt and track productivity of individuals.
Engineering Operations
e.g. How we manage postmortems, pager rotations, bug load, etc.
Personal Productivity
e.g. How each engineer manages their calendar, task, email, Slack, etc.
There are no rows in this table
Step 3: Group poll on pain points
Everyone in the meeting: Silently and individually read the pain points below. Mark how painful each one is to you personally. You can also add any additional pain points that aren’t on the list. Check the box at the bottom when you’re ready to discuss.
Category
Pain Point
Strongly agree
Sort of agree
Not a problem
Planning
The plans we generate are insufficient - either too abstract or too detailed, or lacking clear objectives and/or good success metrics.
Our planning process is a mess, not clear what to do, takes a long time, and the output is not great quality.
We struggle tracking all our projects continuously or it takes an unreasonable amount of time to do so.
Our level of innovation is insufficient
We struggle managing all the backlogged tasks and/or have not created a clear roadmap that organizes our backlog.
The transition from planning to execution is rough. Plans/OKRs are in one set of tools and largely decoupled from how teams are creating their lists of day-to-day tasks
Our launch process is messy and unstructured, often lacking sign-off from important stakeholders like security, legal, marketing, etc
Measuring and reporting who is or has been working on what project or task type (feature development vs maintenance for example) e.g. for Software Capitalization is very time intensive.
Team Collaboration
The information like eng wiki, training, onboarding, talks, career information, all-hands, pager rotations, etc is spread over a lot of different tools and places, often outdated and hard to track.
The information my team needs is spread across countless documents, tools, dashboards that are rarely in sync or take a lot of effort to keep in sync.
Our staff meeting is not great, we do not spend enough time on the right things and too much on the wrong ones.
I am worried about our engineers being overloaded with meetings and not having enough deep focus time for high quality problem solving / coding.
It is hard to track progress on our projects against their goals.
We are not doing enough internal training and learning - and never seem to quite have the time for this important task.
Decision Making
Our meetings have too many and often the wrong participants to be effective decision making forums.
Making good sticky decisions is a problem for our team. We often take too long to make a decision, and once a decision is made it often gets changed later (does not stick).
Team Formation
Keeping track of headcount budgets, creating reports, tracking transfers and hires takes takes a lot of time I would rather spend on other tasks.
We struggle to allocate resources among different engineering teams in order to maximize productivity and meet project deadlines.
Staying on top of the hiring pipeline and being confident we fill our key positions in time.
Managing our interviews is an issue, e.g. training interviewers, managing and balancing interview load, and controlling quality.
We lose diverse talent somewhere along the interviewing funnel.
We need to improve our organizational design, how we form teams and reporting structures.
Team Management
We should do a better job onboarding new engineers and tracking their productivity over the first 6 months.
Many of my 1-1s are unprepared, we do not check OKR progress or developed code frequently enough, and our 1-1 doc is mostly a collection of meeting notes
We should approach sponsorships and mentorships in a more stuctured and organized way.
We are not doing enough employee / manager training.
Team Calibration
We need to improve our performance management process.
We are not using enough objetive data during performance management.
We are not holding people to the same standard across our organization.
We do not have a good succession plan for our critical roles, and/or we do not manage and foster our top engineers enough.
We should improve how we compensate and accurately assess and reward individual performance within the team.
Engineering Design
Our engineering wiki is out of date, not maintained and a big mess.
Our engineering design process is insufficient.
Our engineering review process is insufficient.
Engineering Productivity
We are not managing our tech debt well and are worried it is accumulated in an unmanaged way.
We should track better how the productivity of our engineers is changing over time and per team, and what the biggest friction points are.
Key information we need to monitor is spread across many different dashboards in different tools making it unnecessary hard to see the overall picture.
We need to more systematically measure the impact of productivity related tasks and projects to staff them correctly.
Engineering Operations
Postmortems themselves, and/or the completion of action items from Postmortems are an issue for us.
Our on pager rotations and/or engineers working on customer tickets are unbalanced, understaffed and do not spread the load fairly.
We are doing too many things manually that ideally would be automated.
For many notifications I wish we could automatically notify engineers in the environment they work all the time (e.g. Slack).
Tracking and managing our bug load is an issue for us.
Personal Productivity
I am not making the best use of my executive assistant
Managing my time and calendar is an issue for me
Managing my daily tasks is an issue for me.
I am spending too much time on routine tasks that should be delegated or automated.
I cannot stay on top of my inbox / slack / ....
I’m ready to discuss 
Step 4: Discuss results as a group
Everyone in the meeting: Now, discuss the results of your audit as a group. What did you learn? What will you do now?
Here are the average pain scores for each category:
And here are your team’s most painful challenges. Jot down action items next to each pain point:
Rank
Pain Point
Category
Pain score
Pain Point
Category
Pain score
Action items
The information like eng wiki, training, onboarding, talks, career information, all-hands, pager rotations, etc is spread over a lot of different tools and places, often outdated and hard to track.
Team Collaboration
31
The plans we generate are insufficient - either too abstract or too detailed, or lacking clear objectives and/or good success metrics.
Planning
27
Our planning process is a mess, not clear what to do, takes a long time, and the output is not great quality.
Planning
27
Our launch process is messy and unstructured, often lacking sign-off from important stakeholders like security, legal, marketing, etc
Planning
5
I am worried about our engineers being overloaded with meetings and not having enough deep focus time for high quality problem solving / coding.
Team Collaboration
2
We struggle tracking all our projects continuously or it takes an unreasonable amount of time to do so.
Planning
2
Our level of innovation is insufficient
Planning
2
The transition from planning to execution is rough. Plans/OKRs are in one set of tools and largely decoupled from how teams are creating their lists of day-to-day tasks
Planning
2
No results from filter
Step 5: What’s next?
By the end of the exercise, you’ll have a list of the most painful problems in your engineering org. And hopefully some action items to improve them. So what comes next?
Plato’s community of engineering leaders can help! Contact us below and share the results of your EngOS audit. We’ll connect you with another leader who has already tackled the specific problems you’re facing.
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