Pick Your Top Three Coaching Priorities and Make Each Testable

This is the full playbook from “The CTO Is a Coach First.” The book prints a shorter version at the end of that chapter, and this page keeps every step and every example.

Work through these four steps in order to set Your Top-3 Coaching Priorities.

1. Identify your top three coaching priorities. Not technical priorities. A coaching priority is a specific change in how your team operates, communicates, or grows, one you own personally over the next two quarters. Examples: make code review consistent; build a career ladder for mid-level engineers; close the communication gap between engineering and customer-facing teams. Write down exactly three. More than three and you have a list, and teams do not execute lists with discipline. One selection filter: prefer priorities that build on what this team already does unusually well. A priority that would fit any engineering organization is rarely the best use of your two quarters.
2. Write one coaching goal for each priority, in one sentence, with a test that shows when it’s met. Not “improve collaboration.” This: “Every pull request gets a substantive review within one business day, measured by our existing tooling, for eight consecutive weeks.” A vague goal gives vague coaching. If you can’t state the test, you haven’t defined the goal.
3. Name the specific team problem each priority solves, and connect it to a real event: a complaint you heard, an incident, a person who left or almost left. If you can’t name the problem, look at the priority again. It may be an abstraction you picked up from a book (even this one), a conference talk, or a video.
4. Ask three people who work for you, and one who doesn’t, to describe your leadership in one sentence. Ask in those words. Write down each answer exactly, without softening it into something more agreeable. Compare the answers to the perception gaps in “The CTO Is a Coach First”, then set a dated goal against what you heard. The feedback research says this step, not the asking, separates the managers who improve from the ones who don’t. If the answers surprise you, that surprise is the most useful result you’ll get.

Try this with AI.

“These are four one-sentence descriptions of my leadership, anonymized. Cluster them, name the complaint that shows up in more than one, and turn it into a single dated commitment I can be held to.”

Do this before you read on. The rest of the book assumes you did it honestly.

All of the playbooks are listed on the playbooks page.