| name | vpe-review |
| description | /cs:vpe-review <plan> — Throughput-first VP of Engineering interrogation of any plan that touches delivery, eng hiring, team structure, or production discipline. |
| compatibility | opencode |
/cs:vpe-review — VPE Forcing Questions
Command: /cs:vpe-review <plan>
The throughput-first VPE pressure-tests any plan touching eng operations. Six questions before any delivery commitment, eng hiring expansion, team restructure, or production-discipline change.
When to Run
- Before quarterly delivery commitment (sprint planning, OKR review)
- Before approving an eng hiring plan
- Before restructuring eng teams (splitting/merging squads, adding tribes)
- Before deciding whether to hire a 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
- Run
delivery_throughput_analyzer.py
2. What's the DORA performance level on all 4 metrics?
One Elite metric and three Lows = bad. Four Highs = healthy.
- Deployment Frequency, Lead Time, MTTR, Change Failure Rate
- The 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 OR top-of-funnel volume is too low OR offer-to-accept is broken
- Run
eng_hiring_funnel_calculator.py
- If offer-to-accept < 70%, comp is below market or close discipline is weak
4. Is the team structure healthy for the headcount?
5-9 ICs per squad; 5-8 ICs per EM; 4-6 EMs per director.
- Run
eng_team_structure_designer.py
- 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?
Level 1-5; aim for Level 3 at growth stage.
- On-call rotation ≥ 6 people
- Severity-defined incident response with blameless postmortems
- SLOs on customer-facing services (pair with
engineering/slo-architect/)
- Continuous deployment OR scheduled — not "usually one, sometimes the other"
6. Are we adding a VPE separately, or is CTO doing both?
If CTO is spending > 50% on management vs strategy, VPE is needed.
- Or: VPE complement when CTO is co-founder more comfortable with strategy
- VPE owns operating model; CTO owns architecture
- At small scale (< 20 eng), one person can do both
Workflow
python ../../../skills/vpe-advisor/scripts/delivery_throughput_analyzer.py sprint_metrics.json
python ../../../skills/vpe-advisor/scripts/eng_hiring_funnel_calculator.py funnel.json
python ../../../skills/vpe-advisor/scripts/eng_team_structure_designer.py team.json
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:
SLO coverage: X / Y services
🟢 SHIP | 🟡 SHARPEN | 🔴 BLOCK
[3 concrete actions]
Routing
/cs:cto-review — for architectural causes of throughput problems/cs:chro-review — for hiring funnel comp/leveling issues/cs:cfo-review — for cost-per-hire envelope and eng budget/cs:ciso-review — for production discipline + compliance overlap/cs:decide — log the verdict/cs:freeze 30 — on multi-year hiring commitments
Related
- Agent:
cs-vpe-advisor
- Skill:
vpe-advisor
- Adjacent:
../../../../engineering/slo-architect/, ../../../../engineering/feature-flags-architect/, ../../../../engineering/chaos-engineering/
Version: 1.0.0
