/cs:vpe-review — VPE Forcing Questions

/cs:vpe-review — VPE Forcing Questions

Command: /cs:vpe-review <plan>

The throughput-first VPE pressure-tests any plan touching eng operations. Six questions before any delivery commitment, eng hiring expansion, team restructure, or production-discipline change.

When to Run

• Before quarterly delivery commitment (sprint planning, OKR review)
• Before approving an eng hiring plan
• Before restructuring eng teams (splitting/merging squads, adding tribes)
• Before deciding whether to hire a VPE separately from CTO (or merge them)
• When production incidents are increasing
• When sprint velocity is dropping but everyone says "we're working hard"

The Six VPE Questions

1. What's the cycle time, and where does work wait?

No DORA, no diagnosis.

• Lead Time for Changes is the single best health metric
• If you can't decompose cycle time into stages, you can't fix the bottleneck
• Run delivery_throughput_analyzer.py

2. What's the DORA performance level on all 4 metrics?

One Elite metric and three Lows = bad. Four Highs = healthy.

• Deployment Frequency, Lead Time, MTTR, Change Failure Rate
• The worst metric defines overall level
• Fix lead time first; everything else follows

3. Where is the hiring funnel leaking?

"Can't find good engineers" is wrong.

• Specific stage is over-filtering OR top-of-funnel volume is too low OR offer-to-accept is broken
• Run eng_hiring_funnel_calculator.py
• If offer-to-accept < 70%, comp is below market or close discipline is weak

4. Is the team structure healthy for the headcount?

5-9 ICs per squad; 5-8 ICs per EM; 4-6 EMs per director.

• Run eng_team_structure_designer.py
• Manager-trigger fires when 5+ ICs have no dedicated EM
• Director-trigger fires when 3+ EMs report directly to VPE/CTO

5. What's the production discipline maturity?

Level 1-5; aim for Level 3 at growth stage.

• On-call rotation ≥ 6 people
• Severity-defined incident response with blameless postmortems
• SLOs on customer-facing services (pair with engineering/slo-architect/)
• Continuous deployment OR scheduled — not "usually one, sometimes the other"

6. Are we adding a VPE separately, or is CTO doing both?

If CTO is spending > 50% on management vs strategy, VPE is needed.

• Or: VPE complement when CTO is co-founder more comfortable with strategy
• VPE owns operating model; CTO owns architecture
• At small scale (< 20 eng), one person can do both

Workflow

# 1. Delivery throughput
python ../../../c-level-advisor/skills/vpe-advisor/scripts/delivery_throughput_analyzer.py sprint_metrics.json

# 2. Hiring funnel
python ../../../c-level-advisor/skills/vpe-advisor/scripts/eng_hiring_funnel_calculator.py funnel.json

# 3. Team structure
python ../../../c-level-advisor/skills/vpe-advisor/scripts/eng_team_structure_designer.py team.json

Output Format

# VPE Review: <plan>
**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD

## The Decision Being Made
[throughput | hiring | structure | production | VPE-vs-CTO]

## Delivery Throughput (if applicable)
- DORA overall: Elite / High / Medium / Low
- Worst metric: <DF | LT | MTTR | FR>
- Bottleneck: <stage> (X% of cycle time)
- Top fix: <action + owner>

## Hiring Funnel (if applicable)
- End-to-end conversion: X%
- Weakest stage: <stage>
- Pipeline gap: +N candidates needed
- Top fix: <specific action>

## Team Structure (if applicable)
- Recommended: <informal pods / squads / tribes>
- Manager trigger fired: yes/no
- Director trigger fired: yes/no
- Action: <hire EM | hire director | split squad>

## Production Discipline (if applicable)
- Current maturity level: 1-5
- Next practice to add: <specific>
- SLO coverage: X / Y services

## Verdict
🟢 SHIP | 🟡 SHARPEN | 🔴 BLOCK

## Next Steps
[3 concrete actions]

Routing

• /cs:cto-review — for architectural causes of throughput problems
• cs-chro-advisor agent — for hiring funnel comp/leveling issues
• /cs:cfo-review — for cost-per-hire envelope and eng budget
• /cs:ciso-review — for production discipline + compliance overlap
• /cs:decide — log the verdict
• /cs:freeze 30 — on multi-year hiring commitments

Related

• Agent: cs-vpe-advisor
• Skill: vpe-advisor
• Adjacent: ../../../engineering/slo-architect/, ../../../engineering/feature-flags-architect/, ../../../engineering/chaos-engineering/

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Version: 1.0.0