[heinrichhartman]

One thing we have made good experiences with recently is, having two separate meetings for managing engineering initiatives:

1. Engineering Meeting - led by Principal Engineer. With pure focus on technical questions. We go through open issues, PRs and discuss technical questions, engineering decisions like API design. Stakeholders from other teams are invited to participate.

2. Planning Meeting - led by a Engineering Manager. Report on progress, discuss priorization and decide work assignment a.k.a. "sprint planning". The principal engineer can take part in this as a team member.

This helps me (as a principal) to stay away from people- and project management and purely focus on engineering topics (inc. writing code), which is where I see as my core competence.