The engagement ran about two and a half months in three phases. First, a few weeks of diagnostic work — five sessions with Fede, three with his engineering lead, one with Tomás and Fede together. I wasn’t looking for symptoms; I was looking for the patterns and signals between how they thought the team was operating and how it actually was. The diagnosis surfaced what most scale-ups can’t see when you are running forward: the engineering team’s true capacity was higher than what was getting deployed, OKRs existed but weren’t tied to weekly progress, errors had no priority-and-resolution agreement, and the engineering lead was still doing the work instead of multiplying it.

The next three to four weeks I spent building artifacts the team would actually use — a company roadmap template tied to OKRs and funding cycles that matched their leadership style, a systemic Progress/Painpoints/Plans format so individuals could communicate up - and thus, reducing meeting fatigue - and, an engineering dashboard with the right KPIs for their stage, and a P0–P3 error priority system with clear time-to-resolution agreements.

The hardest work, and the most valuable, happened with their engineering lead. I was coaching him through the transition every engineering leader eventually faces — stop being the best developer on the team and become the person who makes the team better at delivering their own work. After several sessions, the honest answer landed: he didn't want to make the transition. He wanted to stay in the code. I aligned with him on that privately first. Then I brought the recommendation to Tomás and Fede in a separate conversation: protect your talent, move your engineering lead to a senior IC role. The founders had the maturity to hear it, and they built a senior IC track so that he could stay where his strengths actually were. I helped Tomás and Fede shape a path they had not yet considered. Senior IC tracks, instead of pursuing people management, is not a default design — now OOH has one.