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Role Based Path - Director of Engineering

This guide is for Directors of Engineering who manage multiple teams and need repeatable ways to reduce variance, improve predictable delivery, and scale best practices. It focuses on the team-level…

heather.hazell
Updated by heather.hazell

This guide is for Directors of Engineering who manage multiple teams and need repeatable ways to reduce variance, improve predictable delivery, and scale best practices. It focuses on the team-level views that help standardize healthy flow without adding process overhead.

Time Required: 8–12 minutes to orient, 20 minutes to set a multi-team cadence
Difficulty: Easy

TL;DR

  • Use Metrics → Delivery to compare flow and variance across teams.
  • Use Teams → Iterations (Current + Completed) to assess planning stability by team.
  • Use Developer Coaching and Surveys (if enabled) to spot workload/DevEx risks that affect delivery.
  • Scale low-noise standards with gitStream for PR hygiene and review consistency.

What you likely care about

  • Which teams have the biggest drift or variability?
  • Where is flow consistently slowing across multiple groups?
  • Is unplanned work rising in a way that impacts commitments?
  • Which standards should be shared vs. tailored by team?

Where to spend time in LinearB

Metrics → Delivery
  • Identify which stage is the most common multi-team bottleneck.
  • Use trends to validate whether interventions are working.
Teams → Iterations
  • Current: spot scope creep and early risk.
  • Retro: compare planned vs. unplanned and carryover themes.
gitStream (if enabled)
  • Use org or group-level guardrails with thoughtful exceptions.

Metrics to prioritize

  • Cycle Time stage trends.
  • Planned vs unplanned and carryover.
  • PR size/review-friction patterns where relevant.

Recommended Director operating rhythm

  • Weekly: Compare Delivery trends across teams; flag top 1–2 outliers.
  • Per sprint: Review Iterations retros for planning stability and unplanned work sources.
  • Monthly: Align EMs on one shared improvement theme.

Portfolio & allocation signals (if enabled)

For multi-team leaders, Resource Allocation provides an FTE-based view of where time is actually going across projects, epics, initiatives, and other configured breakdowns. This helps you confirm whether capacity aligns with priorities and where you need to rebalance.

  • Review FTE allocation and allocation trends over time to see whether your teams are spending effort where you expect.
  • Use drilldowns to understand contribution mix across work units and spot concentration risk.
  • Pair allocation shifts with Iterations carryover and unplanned work to explain predictability changes and inform staffing or platform requests.

Note: Allocation assigns effort based on the primary assignee; secondary owners are not included in the effort calculation.

Recommended next articles

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Role Based Path - DevEx & Platform Engineering

Role Based Path - Engineering Manager

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