VP of Engineering Plan Review
A VP of Engineering verdict on one hiring plan, reorg, process change, or delivery date, with capacity rebuilt for ramp and hiring load.
Before & after
Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.
That's a significant hiring commitment. You'll want to think about your current throughput capacity and whether your processes can scale. Team dynamics and onboarding are important considerations. You might review your promotion readiness and mentorship structure. Hiring costs and retention matter. You should probably assess whether your infrastructure and documentation are ready for a team that size. Have you considered the training and onboarding infrastructure needed?
THROUGHPUT-FIRST VP OF ENGINEERING INTERROGATION THE PLAN: Add 12 engineers over 12 weeks Team currently: 8 engineers with 3 tech leads Proposed: 20 engineers with 5 tech leads DIAGNOSTICS Onboarding Bottleneck Current ramp: 6 weeks to first production commit Scaling to 20: each new hire loses 0.5 engineer-weeks of velocity 12 hires = 6 engineer-weeks of drag on existing team New estimate: 3 engineers deployed on onboarding full-time Risk: Team velocity drops 25% for quarter Recommendation: Hire 6 now, 6 in Q2 instead Mentorship Gap Current tech leads carry 2-3 direct reports each Proposed: 4 per tech lead (breaks cohesion) Junior retention drops below 60% when span exceeds 3 Recommendation: Hire 2 staff engineers to level mentorship Deployment Capacity Current: 5 deploys per week Forecast with 20 engineers: 2 deploys per week (each deploy more coordination) Cycle time grows from 8 days to 18 days Recommendation: Invest in CI/CD automation before scaling headcount Interview Capacity Hiring 12 requires 400+ interview slots Current team capacity: 200 slots Recommendation: Hire recruiting coordinator or reduce hire target VERDICT Plan is operationally unsound at current scale. Breaks three critical metrics. Go: if you pair hiring with staff engineers + CI/CD investment + staggered timeline No-go: if you execute plan as stated Timing: delays of 3+ weeks recommended before executing full plan.
About this skill
Hiring plans and reorgs usually assume new engineers are productive on day one. This review rebuilds the capacity math and tells you whether the plan delivers what it claims.
What it does
- Rebuilds effective capacity by quarter with ramp, time-to-fill, and feature share
- Checks team boundaries, spans, and ownership after a reorg
- Tests process changes against the bottleneck they claim to fix
- Flags single-date commitments and key-person risk
- Returns a verdict led by the one finding that decides it
What you get
A verdict (approve, approve with conditions, rework), a capacity table, ranked findings, checkable conditions, and what would change the call.
Best for
CEOs, CTOs, and VPs of Engineering before approving a hiring wave, reorg, or roadmap date.
SKILL.md preview
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name: vpe-review
description: Review one engineering plan the way a throughput-focused VP of Engineering would - a hiring wave, a reorg or team split, a new process (on-call, code review policy, sprints), a delivery commitment or roadmap date - by rebuilding the capacity math, checking ramp time, interview load, team boundaries, and hidden queues, and returning approve, approve with conditions, or rework. Use when the user says "review our engineering hiring plan", "sanity check this reorg", "will adding 6 engineers get this out by Q3?", "critique our new on-call policy", "is this roadmap realistic?", or casually "tell me if this eng plan is going to blow up".
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