A Detailed Playbook to Leveling Up Your Meetings, Mentorship, and Career Conversations
6 structured questioning frameworks that every engineer needs in their toolkit to navigate complex projects and people.
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"The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42."
— Douglas Adams.
This bit of absurdist humor is a classic nerd reference from Douglas Adams’ classic work, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The thing is that no one remembers what the original question actually was.
Yet, this is an oddly familiar situation if you’re an engineer at a hardware company. Chances are you’ve been in a two-hour meeting where the discussion has gone so deep into the weeds that you’ve forgotten why the topic came up in the first place. Somewhere between the third slide on register settings and someone’s seventh Jira ticket update, it starts to feel like you’ve stumbled into a scene from Douglas Adams’ work.
Here’s the problem: Universities teach you engineering subjects, but very little about how to work with other people in a professional setting. They do not teach you how to run meetings, work with sales and marketing, pitch ideas to executives, or manage a group of junior engineers. Most people are just thrown in and figure it out for themselves, unless they maybe got a fancy business degree on the side.
This post is a definitive guide to leveling up your corporate game by designing effective meetings, cracking interviews, being an excellent mentor, and having great conversations with people. Specifically, we will adopt the concept of structured questioning — a well-known idea in business and coaching circles that uses questions to methodically explore problems and their potential solutions.
After reading this post, you will learn six unique frameworks that explain:
✅ How to define project goals and run a step-by-step, actionable execution plan.
✅ How to run 1:1 meetings to help team members reach company and career goals.
✅ How to effectively perform root-cause analysis and conduct post-mortems.
✅ How to interview candidates to truly understand their abilities.
✅ How to answer interview questions in a way that best showcases your skills.
✅ How to write annual performance reviews to demonstrate the impact of your work.
✅ How to pitch ideas to senior-level management.
✅ How to negotiate specifications and timelines with product and marketing teams.
✅ How to effectively run weekly sync-ups, stand-ups and status updates.
✅ How to run design reviews with respect, thoroughness and clarity.
Read time: ~20 mins
This should cover most professional interactions you will ever encounter.
There is a lot of content in this post. Instead of digesting it all in one go, I’d recommend that you revisit this when you encounter different situations at work, and pick out some ideas you can try.
For paid subscribers:
Understand all 6 frameworks explained in this post along with specific examples you can use at work.
A practical playbook that guides you through including these frameworks into your day-to-day corporate life.
Five worksheets along with writing prompts that you can just copy-paste and get started using these frameworks.
Let’s dive in! 👇🏽
#1: PPP Method
Let’s start with an easy one. Many daily stand-ups and weekly sync-ups take far too much time than they need to, effectively taking time away from what is important — getting the work done instead of talking about it.
PPP is a simple management technique for structured status updates in recurring meetings. It’s often used in weekly team sync-ups or reports to ensure communication is clear and focused.
Where this is best used
Weekly sync-ups, status updates, daily stand up meetings.
The Framework
Progress: What has been accomplished since the last update?
Plan: What is the plan for the next task period, before the next update is due?
Problems: What issues or blockers have arisen that are impeding progress?
Why it helps
This simple framework has so many benefits that is better to list them all out.
Provides a template for team members to prepare their update around.
Ensures that all team members have a voice, including the quieter ones.
Everyone knows what others are working on and what’s coming next, so they can co-ordinate.
Normalizes bringing up issues so that they can be addressed early on.
Problems are put out in the open so that everyone can brainstorm together.
Enforces a culture of ownership and accountability.
How to use it at work
Scenario: Weekly design updates for upcoming tapeout.
Progress: Layout of the chip is 90% complete, and is passing rule checks and layout-vs-schematic.
Plan: By next week, I plan to complete the last 10%, verify density fill errors and fix them.
Problem: The floorplan is slightly altered compared to preliminary plan. We will need to reverify chip performance in the final form.
Contrast this with an unstructured meeting where the engineer might have given a long narrative but possibly not clearly highlighted the blocker or next steps. PPP keeps it crisp and actionable.
#2: GROW Model
The GROW model has its origins in the world of tennis, when coach Timothy Gallwey found that his players improved much faster when he encouraged them to be self-aware of their actions in the game, rather than telling them explicitly what to do. In 1974, he captured his insights into the well-known book, The Inner Game of Tennis.
This notably influenced Sir John Whitmore who was a respected figure in the world of business coaching, who realized that this idea applies to much more than sports. In his seminal 1992 book, Coaching for Performance, he distilled these insights into the GROW framework which is a widely used coaching framework today.
Where this is best used
Project definition and planning. Useful to see the big picture, brainstorm ideas and break up the problem into manageable, actionable bits.
1:1 meetings. Invaluable when you want to help individuals achieve their career and company goals.
The Framework
Goal: The first step is to clearly define what success looks like with specific, measurable metrics. The more detailed the better, because that will simplify future steps.
Reality: Clearly map out where you currently stand by gathering as many concrete facts as you can. At this stage, resist the temptation to explain or interpret. Just collect objective data. Your goal here is simply to visualize the gap between your current state and your ideal outcome. If there are any historical facts you can use as a reference, include them too.
Options: Brainstorm all possible options that could bridge the gap between your current reality and the desired goal. Encourage broad thinking and consider every potential solution. No idea is off the table; write them all down. Be explicit about the trade-offs associated with each idea. Next, prioritize the list of options based on likely effectiveness to help narrow the focus. Lean on your engineering intuition, past experiences, and the collective wisdom of your team.
Will: The final step is to define the way forward. Ask who will take up work on a specific idea, and when they will have results. This gives clear buy-in and a way to drive ideas to conclusions.
Why it works
The end goal is always in sight, and meandering discussions can be nipped at the bud. There is clear definition of the gap between current state of affairs and the intended outcome. The brainstorming of problem solutions and timelines to evaluate their effectiveness drives projects to natural conclusions.
How to use it at work
Here is an example showing how this framework can be used to plan a project for design performance improvements.
G: Improve the linearity of the system by 3 dB at a specified operating condition.
R: Identify what the current linearity is, what the linearity of previous products are, what are the dominant sources of nonlinear action, and where possible improvements can be made.
O: Brainstorm ideas to improve the linearity of critical blocks — lower current? redesign output stages? alternate architectures? For each idea, evaluate trade-offs, possibility of success and level of effort. Prioritize them in a list.
W: Ask team members to take ownership of each idea, perform simulation analysis, and establish a timeline when results can be reviewed to see progress.
A system like this will ensure a smooth progress of projects without endless meetings containing unstructured content that everybody walks away from feeling that it's a waste of time.
The same approach can be used in 1:1 meetings to highlight what you have been working on and how it’s going. The framework just needs to be slightly adapted to this case:
G: I have been working on improving the coverage of the verification plan for block X.
R: At the moment, we are only covering 50% of all the cases we should be.
O: I am investigating all the use cases which need to be covered and documenting why we missed them.
W: I intend to push the coverage to 95%+ before our 1:1 meeting next month.
🔒 The rest of this post is for paid subscribers.
You’ve just learned 2 of the 6 key frameworks that lead to better meetings and drive clarity at work.
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4 more high-impact frameworks, including interview strategies and design review tactics
Worksheets with writing prompts that gets you using these frameworks quickly
A practical guide to introducing these tools into your workflow