vpe-review

---
name: vpe-review
description: Use when cycle time balloons, DORA metrics slide, or before eng hiring wave, team reorg, or delivery commitment. Six questions on throughput, hiring, structure, production discipline.
category: C-Level Advisory
version: 1.0.0
tools: []
---

# VPE Review — Throughput-First Interrogation

Pressure-test any plan touching eng operations: delivery commitment, eng hiring expansion, team restructure, production discipline change.

## When to Run

- Before quarterly delivery commitment (sprint planning, OKR review)
- Before approving eng hiring plan
- Before restructuring eng teams (splitting/merging squads, adding tribes)
- Before deciding 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. Top bottleneck is the move.

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

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

The four metrics:
- **Deployment Frequency** — how often do you deploy to production?
- **Lead Time for Changes** — from commit to production
- **Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)** — how fast to recover from failures
- **Change Failure Rate** — what percentage of changes cause issues?

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, top-of-funnel volume too low, or offer-to-accept broken.

If offer-to-accept < 70%, your compensation is below market or close discipline is weak.

### 4. Is the team structure healthy for the headcount?

**Standard ratios for healthy org:**
- 5-9 individual contributors per squad
- 5-8 individual contributors per EM
- 4-6 EMs per director

**Triggers:**
- 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?

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

Core practices:
- On-call rotation with ≥ 6 people
- Severity-defined incident response with blameless postmortems
- SLOs defined on customer-facing services
- Continuous OR scheduled deployment—not "usually one, sometimes the other"

### 6. Are we hiring VPE separately, or is CTO doing both?

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

- Alternative: VPE complement when CTO is co-founder more comfortable with strategy
- Role split: VPE owns operating model; CTO owns architecture
- At scale < 20 engineers, one person can do both

## 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]