Claude Code for Engineering Managers: How I Run 1:1s (Never Miss a Thing)

As an engineering manager, you need to run one-on-ones with the team, and there's a lot of note-taking. When preparing for the one-on-one, during the meeting, and after it. Here's how I use Claude Code to manage all of that note-taking.

I run it in Obsidian. Check out my other video why Obsidian and how I use Claude Code in the terminal of Obsidian. Today, we're going to talk about one-on-ones.

That's the folder that has a lot of folders, one per every engineer. And in each engineer's folder, we have an engineer's file where I keep all of our one-on-ones and recordings. Meeting recordings file from Gemini and so on.

We'll talk about it in a minute. Here's how one item in this one-on-one file looks like. The date, my agenda, their agenda, and commitments.

Something we had lined during the meeting. And here's how Claude Code comes into play. I had an idea I want to discuss with Joey something on our next one-on-one.

So, I'm putting here command engineer and the item I want to discuss. And what this command does, uh if I have a future meeting with this engineer, it will add it to this meeting. If I don't, it will create a new item and uh add this to my agenda.

Okay, that's exactly what happened. Uh so, this date is in the past, so Claude Code figured out that I want to talk with Joey someday in future, and it added this item to my agenda. Let's go to next phase, preparing for one-on-one.

Uh so, that's what I want to bring up my next meeting with Joey. What else is important here? Commitments.

I have a time in my calendar once in a week that I go over commitments with the team, and I can act on this so that I can come to the next meeting and update my engineer. Uh so, that was a commitment that I act on. Great.

Then, here comes the meeting. Right before the meeting, it takes like 5 minutes or even less to review my agenda, open commitments, and get prepared for the meeting. There goes the meeting.

Joey comes and brings his agenda. Then, I'm happy to bring up my agenda, and we outline some commitments. And um I mostly don't take notes.

Note takers take notes. Fathom, Gemini, and so on. So, they will record it, and then I just need to sync it into these folders, and also into this file, their agenda and other commitments that we took.

And I have another command for that called sync one-on-ones. We can just run it. I can run it periodically, but it's even better to tie it to some existing command that I run periodically.

Like week rollover that we discussed. I run it every Monday. Um Together with that, it syncs all of my one-on-ones and populates all of these one-on-one files.

You can also set it up to run it periodically as a cron job. So, let's run it. So, here is the result.

Populated their agenda, that's something that Joey uh and I discussed in our one-on-one, and commitments, something that we need to act upon. Um and as I said, I mostly don't take notes, but some critically important notes I do take. Why so?

I just wanted to keep it in my own words. And also when I'm typing it in, it better sticks in my head. Some people even prefer taking notes in a paper physical notepad.

What else it gives to us? We can now ask Claude Code to find patterns in my one-on-ones, in what my team brings up, in what I can improve. But, important note on this, be a human.

Rely on your own perception, not on AI's. It's just bad management style and uncanny to come to your engineer and say something just because AI told you so. Rely on your own perception.

Use it just as a reference, just as a coaching for yourself. That's it. I'm sharing my cases of using AI in everyday manager's life.

Let's discuss your team, talk to me.