--- title: "Stop leading in isolation: build a community of practice for engineering managers | 1:1 mentoring" description: "Bi-weekly rituals, 6 discussion areas, the tiger-team model, and the exact tools to run a CoP that genlly changes how EMs work. Real playbook, not theory." url: "https://www.marian.coach/blog/community-of-practice-for-engineering-managers/" lang: "en" image: "https://www.marian.coach/images/blog-covers/community-of-practice-for-engineering-managers.jpg" --- ![Stop leading in isolation: build a community of practice for engineering managers](https://www.marian.coach/images/blog-covers/community-of-practice-for-engineering-managers.jpg) Engineering managers juggle a lot: team dynamics, business alignment, and driving improvement, all at the same time. These challenges are too complex to tackle alone. A community of practice makes the difference. > A community of practice brings engineering leaders together to exchange ideas, share experiences, and grow, outside the reporting hierarchy. In practice it runs on collaboration and experimentation between the managers themselves, so there’s no rigid process to roll out and no directive coming from the top. Here’s how to build one that actually works. ## Purpose: three pillars Communities of practice stand on three pillars: **helping collaboration**, **fuelling growth**, and **leading with consistency**. - A **platform for peer learning**, where members share knowledge and grow together. - A **source of inspiration**, offering success strategies and best practices. - A **safe space** for asking questions and sharing tips. - A **framework for alignment** on performance ratings, promotions, and hiring practices, so managers decide these the same way. - And a **communication channel** for topics like promotion planning and performance review updates. ## Who it’s for Every engineer has the potential to lead. Here, we help each other take the next step. ![Marian Kamenistak at the Engineering Leaders Community conference 2026.](https://www.marian.coach/_astro/talk-40.C42wvuNe_ZytfyN.webp) At an Engineering Leaders Community conference — the same peer energy a bi-weekly CoP is built to sustain. The community is for [everyone in engineering leadership](https://www.marian.coach/what-is-engineering-leadership/): managers, directors, and those preparing to step into leadership roles. Wherever you are on your journey, it’s a space to learn, share, and connect with peers. ## Principles Each community thrives on shared values: - **Respect**: every voice matters. Ideas are shared openly, received with care. - **Experimentation**: members are encouraged to try new approaches and share the learning. - **Growth**: celebrate successes, learn from mistakes. ## How it operates ### Regular meetings Bi-weekly meetings are the heart: structured sessions where members discuss topics, share insights, and ask questions. - **Collaborative agenda:** participants suggest discussion points in advance. - **Facilitator role:** ensures each meeting is impactful. Facilitators prep additional topics to guide conversations, especially in early stages when members need more direction. ## What gets discussed: 6 categories **1\. Ad-hoc topics**: specific challenges, concerns, or gaps members bring in. **2\. Learning and development**: book summaries on engineering management, communication, collaboration, best practices. **3\. Top-down communication** - **Salary bands:** explain methods and approaches when new salary ranges are available. - **[Performance reviews](https://www.marian.coach/blog/11-keys-to-mastering-performance-reviews/):** changes to the process, examples of effective goals. - **Promotions:** consistency across managers when advancing team members. **4\. Agility** - **Experiment sharing:** what teams tried, what worked, what didn’t (e.g., new retro formats). - **Metrics & KPIs:** exchange [useful metrics for daily EM tasks](https://www.marian.coach/blog/better-than-dora-metrics-team-productivity/). - **Agile collaboration:** work with the agile community on continuous-improvement experiments. **5\. Recruitment and organisation** - **Quarterly recruitment stats:** funnel performance, successes, challenges. - **Team growth priorities:** upcoming projects, hiring priorities, team shifts. **6\. Best practices and incidents** - **Incidents:** key lessons to avoid repeating mistakes. - **Vertical slicing:** creative ways to deliver customer value quickly. Guest speakers from other departments (Talent, People, Community Management) round out perspectives. ## Rules of engagement Keep meetings efficient and outcome-driven: 1. **Topic introduction**: the facilitator shares the agenda and invites the submitter to explain. 2. **Quick solutions**: if the topic is simple or informational, resolve it during the meeting. 3. **Complex issues**: assess priority as a group. If worth investigating, form a **tiger team** (topic submitter + 2-3 others) who work on it offline and present at the next meeting. ## Communication channels - **Shared calendar** for bi-weekly meetings. - **Dedicated Slack (or Teams) channel** for async discussion between sessions. - **Asana / Jira / Trello** for tracking tiger-team work and follow-ups. - **Shared Notion / Confluence space** for meeting notes, book summaries, and pattern library. ## What “success” looks like Six months in, you’ll notice the change in a few places. ![Marian Kamenistak pointing at a slide scoring AI-assisted engineering skills — agentic coding, AI code review, MCP integration — against a mid-level developer salary.](https://www.marian.coach/_astro/talk-41.lxux8gFJ_Z2btdjU.webp) The Engineering Leaders Community conference in practice: managers learning from managers. Managers start reaching for peers before they reach for you, which is the moment the senior EM stops being the bottleneck for every decision. Promotions run on the same rubric across the org, salary-band conversations sound the same in every team, and so does the feedback style. Lessons from one team’s incident land in the next team’s playbook instead of being relearned the hard way. And new managers ramp faster, because they join a working community on day one, as opposed to figuring everything out alone. ## The tempo I recommend - **Month 1:** define purpose, principles, cadence. Two or three “seed” topics ready. - **Month 2-3:** facilitator prepares agendas actively. Members observe, learn the format. - **Month 4+:** rotate facilitation. Members own the agenda. Facilitator becomes janitor. - **Month 6:** first tiger-team output ships as a company-wide guideline. ## Mission The more we help raise [first-time engineering managers](https://www.marian.coach/engineering-manager-mentor/) in our territory, the faster our local companies match Berlin and London. A CoP is one of the highest-value moves in that direction. How about your company, do the managers meet like this, or does everyone still lead alone? 1:1 mentoring ## Ready to move this from advice to action? 1:1 mentoring for engineering leaders. 300+ mentees since 2019. Pay-as-you-go or a 6-session pack. First intro is free. [Book a free 30-min intro →](https://www.marian.coach/mentoring/) ## Read next - [ ### Should I Become a Team Lead? A 6-Dimension Answer Six dimensions predict whether the team lead role will fit you, drawn from 3,400+ mentoring sessions. Take the 3-minute test, get a straight verdict. 22 July 2026 · By Marian Read → ](https://www.marian.coach/blog/should-i-become-a-team-lead/) - [ ### AI Agents Don't Shrink Engineering Teams. They Expose Weak Managers. What AI coding agents change about the first-line engineering manager job: not headcount first, but feedback loops, spans, and what the role is for. 21 July 2026 · By Marian Read → ](https://www.marian.coach/blog/ai-agents-first-line-engineering-manager/) - [ ### Fire, fix, or invest? The 3 performance criteria every leader needs. Fire or invest? Learn 3 key criteria for tough performance decisions before it's too late. Avoid common mistakes and take action to protect your team. 20 February 2025 · By Marian Read → ](https://www.marian.coach/blog/3-performance-criteria-every-leader-needs/) ### New posts, straight to your inbox. Your emailSubscribe You're on it. Nothing hits your inbox today. First send goes out once the list is live, and you're already on it. [Connect on LinkedIn →](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariankamenistak/)[See the free tools →](https://www.marian.coach/ai-coaching-tools/) ## Structured data ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"ProfessionalService","name":"Marian Kamenistak | Engineering Leadership Mentoring","url":"https://www.marian.coach/blog/community-of-practice-for-engineering-managers/","image":"https://www.marian.coach/images/blog-covers/community-of-practice-for-engineering-managers.jpg","description":"Bi-weekly rituals, 6 discussion areas, the tiger-team model, and the exact tools to run a CoP that genlly changes how EMs work. Real playbook, not theory.","serviceType":["Engineering leadership mentoring","Engineering manager coaching","CTO coaching","Fractional CTO","Leadership development for software engineers"],"hasOfferCatalog":{"@type":"OfferCatalog","name":"Engineering leadership mentoring and advisory","itemListElement":[{"@type":"Offer","itemOffered":{"@type":"Service","name":"1:1 engineering leadership mentoring","description":"One-to-one mentoring for engineering leaders from Staff Engineer to CTO. 60-minute sessions, weekly or bi-weekly.","url":"https://www.marian.coach/pricing/"}},{"@type":"Offer","itemOffered":{"@type":"Service","name":"Engineering manager coaching","description":"Coaching for first-time and experienced engineering managers: delegation, performance, hiring, team scaling.","url":"https://www.marian.coach/engineering-manager-mentor/"}},{"@type":"Offer","itemOffered":{"@type":"Service","name":"CTO and VP Engineering mentoring","description":"Mentoring for CTOs, VPs of Engineering and Heads of Engineering running 30-200 person organisations.","url":"https://www.marian.coach/cto-mentor/"}},{"@type":"Offer","itemOffered":{"@type":"Service","name":"Mentor in Residence","description":"A dedicated onsite mentor for your engineering organisation, booked by the quarter.","url":"https://www.marian.coach/mentor-in-residence/"}},{"@type":"Offer","itemOffered":{"@type":"Service","name":"Fractional CTO","description":"Part-time CTO engagements for companies without a full-time technology leader.","url":"https://www.marian.coach/fractional-cto/"}}]},"telephone":"+420 736 519 879","email":"marian@marian.coach","sameAs":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariankamenistak/","https://www.youtube.com/@engineeringleaders","https://github.com/marian-kamenistak","https://www.engineeringleaders.io/","https://twitter.com/marian_coaches","https://www.elc-conference.io/","https://www.marianslist.com/","https://www.mentoringhub.io/"],"address":{"@type":"PostalAddress","streetAddress":"Varšavská 715/36, Vinohrady","addressLocality":"Praha 2","postalCode":"12000","addressCountry":"CZ"},"geo":{"@type":"GeoCoordinates","latitude":50.0734418,"longitude":14.4385757},"openingHoursSpecification":[{"@type":"OpeningHoursSpecification","dayOfWeek":["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"],"opens":"09:00","closes":"17:00"}],"priceRange":"361–430 EUR","areaServed":[{"@type":"Place","name":"Europe"},{"@type":"Country","name":"Czechia"},{"@type":"Country","name":"Slovakia"},{"@type":"Country","name":"Poland"},{"@type":"Place","name":"North America"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Person","@id":"https://www.marian.coach/#person","name":"Marian Kamenistak","url":"https://www.marian.coach/","image":"https://www.marian.coach/images/blog-covers/community-of-practice-for-engineering-managers.jpg","jobTitle":["Engineering Leadership Mentor","Engineering Manager Coach","CTO Coach","Keynote Speaker"],"hasOccupation":{"@type":"Occupation","name":"Engineering Leadership Mentor"},"worksFor":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Engineering Leaders Community","url":"https://www.engineeringleaders.io/"},"alumniOf":[{"@type":"Organization","name":"Mews"},{"@type":"Organization","name":"Manta (acquired by IBM)"},{"@type":"Organization","name":"Databricks"}],"knowsLanguage":["English","Czech","Slovak"],"knowsAbout":["Engineering leadership","Engineering management","Scaling engineering teams","CTO mentoring","Engineering org design","VP of Engineering role","Engineering director role","CTPO role","Team lead development","Staff engineer career path","Fractional CTO engagements","AI-assisted engineering leadership","Conference keynotes on engineering leadership","Panel moderation","Podcast guest — engineering leadership"],"homeLocation":{"@type":"Place","name":"Prague, Czechia"},"sameAs":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariankamenistak/","https://www.youtube.com/@engineeringleaders","https://github.com/marian-kamenistak","https://www.engineeringleaders.io/","https://twitter.com/marian_coaches","https://www.elc-conference.io/","https://www.marianslist.com/","https://www.mentoringhub.io/","https://www.crunchbase.com/person/marian-kamenistak","https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q140488098","https://developers.mews.com/author/marian/","https://startupdisrupt.com/speakers/marian-kamenistak/","https://theorg.com/org/engineering-leaders-community/org-chart/marian-kamenistak"]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"WebPage","url":"https://www.marian.coach/blog/community-of-practice-for-engineering-managers/","name":"Stop leading in isolation: build a community of practice for engineering managers | 1:1 mentoring","inLanguage":"en","dateModified":"2026-08-14T00:00:00.000Z"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BlogPosting","headline":"Stop leading in isolation: build a community of practice for engineering managers","description":"Bi-weekly rituals, 6 discussion areas, the tiger-team model, and the exact tools to run a CoP that genlly changes how EMs work. Real playbook, not theory.","inLanguage":"en","articleSection":"engineering-management","datePublished":"2024-12-15T00:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-14T00:00:00.000Z","author":{"@id":"https://www.marian.coach/#person"},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Marian Kamenistak","url":"https://www.marian.coach/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://www.marian.coach/favicon-192x192.webp","width":192,"height":192}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://www.marian.coach/images/blog-covers/community-of-practice-for-engineering-managers.jpg"},"mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://www.marian.coach/blog/community-of-practice-for-engineering-managers/"},"keywords":"engineering-management, community, playbook, leadership","wordCount":858,"timeRequired":"PT4M","isAccessibleForFree":true} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://www.marian.coach/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Blog","item":"https://www.marian.coach/blog/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Stop leading in isolation: build a community of practice for engineering managers","item":"https://www.marian.coach/blog/community-of-practice-for-engineering-managers/"}]} ```