18 Free Templates for Engineering Managers, Plus One

You do not need to build a postmortem doc, a career ladder, or a kickoff form from scratch. Teams who do this every day have already written the templates and given them away for free, and most of them are better than what you would write under deadline pressure anyway. This is a shortlist of the best free ones for engineering managers, grouped by the job each one does. A quick note on the count, so the title is honest: seventeen of these come from other teams. One (number 18) is ours. Four more of ours are linked inline where the category matches, also free. And the last one, the plus-one, is written out in full at the bottom so you can copy it right now without leaving the page.

Pick the two or three that match a gap you have this quarter. A template you never adapt is worse than none, because it looks like a process without being one.

Incident reviews and postmortems

When something breaks, a good template keeps the review blameless and focused on the system, not the person. It also saves you from writing the structure while you are still tired from the outage. These four are the standards, and any of them will hold up in front of a nervous team.

1. Example postmortem, Google SRE. A full worked example, not a blank form, so you can see what "good" reads like. sre.google/sre-book/example-postmortem
2. Postmortem template, Atlassian. A clean fill-in structure with timeline, impact, and action items. atlassian.com/incident-management/postmortem/templates
3. Postmortem template, PagerDuty. Open source and battle-tested by an on-call company. response.pagerduty.com/after/post_mortem_template
4. Debriefing Facilitation Guide, Etsy. Less a form, more a guide to running the conversation so people tell the truth. etsy.com/codeascraft/debriefing-facilitation-guide

Retrospectives

A repeatable retro format beats a blank whiteboard every time. Rotate between these two so the team does not go on autopilot.

5. Retrospective play, Atlassian Team Playbook. A step-by-step way to run a retro, including timing and prompts, so the facilitator is not improvising. atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/retrospective
6. Sailboat and 4Ls retro, Atlassian. A visual format that gets quieter people talking. atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/sailboat-retrospective

Career ladders and growth

If your levels are vague, promotions turn into arguments. These give you a real framework to adapt instead of inventing one under pressure.

7. Progression.fyi. A library of 75 open career frameworks from real companies, free to copy. progression.fyi
8. EngineeringLadders.com. A compact, opinionated ladder you can fork on day one. engineeringladders.com

If you want a lighter starting point tuned for small teams, we also wrote a free engineering ladder template that you can fill in for a single team without adopting a whole company system.

Design docs, RFCs, and decision records

The value of these is not the document. It is that a teammate three weeks later can read why you chose what you chose without asking you.

9. designdocs.dev. Over 1000 real design-doc examples to learn the shape from. designdocs.dev
10. HashiCorp RFC template. The format behind how HashiCorp makes technical decisions in writing. hashicorp.com/how-hashicorp-works/articles/rfc-template
11. Design Docs at Google, Industrial Empathy. The essay that explains what a design doc is for and when to skip it. industrialempathy.com/posts/design-docs-at-google
12. Architecture Decision Record templates. A well-kept repo of ADR formats for recording one decision at a time. github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture-decision-record

Two of ours slot in here. A decision log system for keeping those choices findable over time, and a code ownership matrix template so people know who owns what before they need to ask.

1:1s, standups, goals, and reviews

The recurring rituals eat the most time, so a shared format pays off fastest here.

13. 1:1 suggested agenda, GitLab Handbook. A simple agenda that keeps the meeting the report's, not yours. handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/suggested-agenda-format
14. Daily standup format, GitLab Handbook. How a fully-remote company runs standups without a daily meeting. handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1
15. OKRs guide and examples, Google re:Work. How to set goals that are ambitious and still measurable. rework.withgoogle.com/guides/set-goals-with-okrs
16. Performance self-review template, The Pragmatic Engineer. A worked example that helps engineers write reviews that actually help them. blog.pragmaticengineer.com/performance-review-template-and-example-for-software-engineers

New hires are the other recurring drain. Our free new-hire onboarding checklist covers the first weeks so the same questions do not get answered from scratch every time.

Kickoffs and handoffs

The start and the handoff are where context leaks. A template catches it before it walks out the door.

17. Project kickoff template, Atlassian. Aligns scope, owners, and risks before the first line of code. atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/project-kickoff
18. Engineering handoff template, StandIn. This is number 18, and it is ours. A short structure for handing a project or an on-call rotation to someone else without a long meeting. Free engineering handoff template

The plus-one we made: a coverage plan

Here is the original. Most of the templates above cover what to write down while you are at work. This one covers the gap when you are not: who answers what while you are out, within what limits, and where the answer lives. Copy the list below and fill in the brackets.

Coverage plan

• I am out: [dates], back [date].
• The one thing to know: [the single most important status, in one line].

Then, for each topic people ask you about, fill in one block:

1. Topic: [e.g. the payments migration]
2. Who answers while I am out: [name], or "the record" if it is already written down.
3. What they can decide: [the limit, e.g. "can approve rollbacks; cannot change the launch date"].
4. What waits for me: [anything no one should decide without you].
5. Where the answer lives: [link to the doc, thread, or ticket].

Close with two lines:

• Do not wait on me for: [things people should just decide themselves].
• Reach me only if: [the one real emergency].

The point of this one is limits. A coverage plan that only says "ask a teammate" turns that teammate into a bottleneck and turns you into a phone call on your day off. Naming what someone can decide, and where the answer already lives, is what actually keeps things moving while you are gone. Fill this in before a vacation, before a long flight, or at the end of any day where you know tomorrow is not yours. It takes five minutes and it saves the people covering for you an hour of guessing.

How to actually use these

Do not adopt all eighteen. Pick the ones that match a real pain, copy them into wherever your team already reads, and change the wording so it sounds like your team and not a vendor. Templates fail when they are pristine and unused. They work when they are a little messy and everyone knows where they live. Set a low bar for the first version and improve it after you have run it once for real.

Make the templates answer for you

A template is only useful if the person who needs it can find it and read it without you in the room. That last gap, the coverage plan, is the one StandIn is built for. You write one short brief at the end of your day, and while you are off, it answers your teammates from what you actually wrote, with a source under each answer. When the answer is not in the record, it says so instead of guessing. The templates capture the work. StandIn lets the work answer the question while you are away.