One-on-one meetings are a unique opportunity for managers to see how their engineers are doing, and for engineers to learn from their managers. However, “how an engineer is doing” is difficult to quantify. This means one-on-ones become more about trying to measure progress and less about forming connections between engineers and their managers. Pluralsight Flow is addressing that imbalance with its newest report, Check-in.

Check-in makes one-on-ones more productive and meaningful by helping engineers set goals, measuring their activity in a custom time period up to 90 days, showing a code commit breakdown and celebrating successes while suggesting areas of improvement.

More productive one-on-one meetings

The Check-in report is built for one-on-ones, so that managers and individual contributors have quick insights into an engineer’s progress, and so managers can instead focus on building connections and fostering a healthy culture. Here’s how we recommend using Check-in in your one-on-ones.

First, track success on previously-placed goals. Check-in has a curated list of seven short-term goals that tie to metrics within Flow. This includes making smaller and more frequent commits, or reducing the amount of time it takes to move pull requests through the review and deployment pipeline. 

Next, measure an engineer’s work. You can look at an engineer’s work for up to 90 days, but we recommend viewing the days since your last one-on-one with the engineer. Check-in has widgets where an engineer can see their work distribution. They can understand what percentage of commits were brand new work, legacy refactor, helping others and rework. These numbers get at the core of an engineer’s workflow. Should they be unevenly distributed across these types of commits, that’s a great opportunity for a conversation during the one-on-one. 

Last, set new goals. You can do this using the preset goals, but Check-in also makes suggestions based on where an engineer is succeeding and where they can improve with the “Great work!” and “Room to grow” widgets.

Pluralsight’s internal Flow team has already gotten great value from the Check-in report in the short time we’ve been using it. It’s a powerful answer to the question of, “How can leaders utilize Flow metrics during the weekly one-on-one to help engineers set and work toward individual, engineering-specific goals?”

Increased developer satisfaction

This report can greatly improve developer satisfaction which helps create team stability, something that has never been more valuable than during the ongoing Great Resignation. The Check-in report can also lead directly towards improved cycle time, lead time and queue time as well, all of which are vital in creating a healthy product pipeline.

To learn how else you can improve developer satisfaction with Flow, contact sales or your CSM.