---
layout: post
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date: 2026-10-18 08:00
title: Seven One-to-One Questions That Go Deeper Than "How's It Going?"
seo_title: "Seven Better One-to-One Questions for Engineering Managers"
seo_description: "Seven one-to-one questions engineering managers can use to get past status updates and into real conversations about work, growth and wellbeing."
type: blog
---

The easiest one-to-one to run is a status update. It's also the least useful: you can get status from the board. The point of the time is the stuff that never makes it onto a ticket.

Here are seven questions I come back to:

1. **What's taking more energy than it should right now?** Gets at friction (process, tooling, people) without asking anyone to complain.
2. **If you could change one thing about how the team works, what would it be?** Small enough to answer honestly, specific enough to act on.
3. **What did you do recently that you're proud of, that I might not have noticed?** Managers miss a lot. This fixes some of it.
4. **What would you like to be doing more of in six months?** Career conversations work better as a direction than a job title.
5. **Is there anything you're waiting on me for?** A useful check on whether I'm the bottleneck.
6. **How are you, really, on a scale of one to five?** A number is easier to give than a feeling, and it's easy to follow up on.
7. **What should I be asking you that I'm not?** Hands them the agenda.

You don't need all seven every week. Pick one or two, then mostly listen.

I've put a few hundred of these into [EngMan](/projects/engman), a free iOS app of swipeable coaching cards for one-to-ones, refinement, wellbeing, performance and more. If you prefer paper, the [One-to-One & Coaching Toolkit](https://shop.thechels.uk/l/one-to-one) has templates for running and recording them, plus GROW-model coaching prompts.