90-Day Execution Plan for an Engineering Organization
This is the last of three posts based on a consulting engagement I did for a LATAM payments fintech. Names, data, and details have been changed. In the first post I did the organizational diagnosis. In the second, the metrics strategy. Here's the plan to put everything into action.
A diagnosis without execution is just a nice document. The 90-day plan is where decisions become concrete actions.
Squad rituals
Rituals aren't meetings for the sake of meetings — they're the minimum touchpoints to keep the team aligned without wasting time.
Before the sprint
- Refinement (45min) — describe tickets, clarify scope, estimate
- Sprint Planning (1h) — decide what goes into the sprint
Weekly
- Sync Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (15min) — three times a week, not five. The days without syncs are for developers to have long, uninterrupted focus blocks. A 15-minute daily seems harmless, but five in a row fragment the week more than you'd think.
Bi-weekly
- 1:1 with each engineer (30min)
End of sprint
- Squad retro (30min)
- Engineering-wide retro (30min) — in my experience, this is where the team truly aligns. Problems, solutions, and context are shared across squads. It generates more collaboration than any document.
- Demo for business stakeholders (30min)
Metrics-driven planning
Estimation
The scale follows the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8) — the gaps between numbers reflect that the bigger something is, the more uncertainty it carries.
| Points | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Trivial, < 2 hours | Fix typo, config change |
| 2 | Simple, half a day | Clear bug, minor adjustment |
| 3 | Moderate, 1-2 days | Small feature, scoped refactor |
| 5 | Complex, 3-4 days | Full feature, integration |
| 8 | Very complex, 1 week | New system, high uncertainty |
| > 8 | Must be split | Too large |
Voting in refinement matters — the context from whoever worked on it before and senior expertise carries weight. If there's a difference greater than 3 points between votes, discuss it. That's where hidden dependencies and risks surface.
Capacity
- Historical velocity (average of last 3 sprints) as ceiling
- Commitment at 80% of capacity
- 20% buffer for interruptions
- WIP limit: maximum 2 tickets per person
Target sprint composition
- Minimum 50% features
- Maximum 25% bugs
- Maximum 15% interruptions
These numbers are a guide, not a rigid rule. They adjust based on squad context and timing.
Prioritization system
For the backlog (in refinement)
Score = (Revenue Impact × Confidence) / Effort
- Revenue Impact (1-5) = how much it affects revenue
- Confidence (1-5) = how clear the scope is
- Effort (1-5) = estimated effort
| Ticket | Revenue Impact | Confidence | Effort | Score | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fix Payout Service crash | 4 | 5 | 2 | 10 | P1 |
| Migrate endpoint | 2 | 5 | 3 | 3.3 | P2 |
| Reporting feature | 3 | 3 | 5 | 1.8 | P3 |
For the sprint
- P0: Production incidents → interrupts sprint, handle immediately
- P1: Direct revenue impact → enters next sprint
- P2: Improvements → prioritized backlog
- P3: Nice to have → backlog
For unplanned work
- P0: Production down → interrupts sprint
- P1: Client blocked → same day
- P2: Everything else → goes to backlog, prioritized in next planning
P0 and P1 fit into the 20% buffer reserved in the sprint for interruptions.
Process fixes
Work intake
- Every request enters through a single channel
- EM triages the same day
- If urgent (P0/P1): enters current sprint
- If not urgent: goes to backlog for next planning
Scoping
- Tickets without acceptance criteria don't enter the sprint
- Tickets larger than 8 points get split
- Dependencies identified before planning
Escalations
- Engineer → Senior/EM: when blocked or needs a technical decision
- Senior/EM → CTO: when there's business risk (client affected, revenue at risk)
Outage management
- Blameless postmortem within 48 hours
- Template: what happened, timeline, impact, root cause, action items
- Share learnings in engineering retro
- Track action items until closure
Releases
- Diagnose architecture and tech debt across projects
- Improve release testing — QA by the same developers who built the feature
- Validate production deployments for 15-30 minutes
- Create alerts for service behavior and errors
Reporting
Weekly to CTO
- Status: On Track / At Risk / Blocked
- Metrics vs targets
- Decisions that need input
- Forecast for next 2 weeks
End of sprint to business stakeholders
- What was completed
- What was moved and why
- Next sprint
Monthly
- OKR review
- Capacity planning for next month
- Adjustments based on learnings
Improvement targets with DORA Metrics
To know if you're improving you need clear targets. DORA Metrics is a framework from Google's DevOps Research and Assessment team that classifies engineering team performance into four levels.
DORA Benchmark
| Metric | Elite | High | Medium | Low |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CFR | <5% | 5-10% | 10-15% | >15% |
| MTTR | <1h | <1 day | 1d-1 week | >1 week |
| Deploy Frequency | Multiple/day | Daily-weekly | Weekly-monthly | Monthly+ |
| Lead Time | <1h | 1d-1 week | 1 week-1 month | 1-6 months |
Targets for this organization
| Metric | Current | Target 30d | Target 90d | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CFR Payout Service | 23% (Low) | 15% | <10% | Low → Medium → High |
| CFR Split Engine | 9% (High) | 8% | <5% | High → Elite |
| Flow Eff. Payouts | 13% | 20% | >30% | Reduce wait time |
| Flow Eff. Payments Core | 27% | 30% | >35% | More productive time |
| Cycle Time P75 Payouts | 19.7d | 14d | <10d | Fit in a sprint |
| Cycle Time P75 Payments Core | 10.2d | 9d | <8d | Sprint margin |
| Sprint Completion | ~60% | 70% | >80% | Predictability |
| % Interruptions | ~30% | 20% | <15% | Protect roadmap |
Team health and culture
Metrics measure the system. But behind the system there are people. If you don't take care of the team, no metric improves.
Month 1 — listen and diagnose
- 1:1 with each engineer to get to know them
- Identify burnout risk, especially in Payouts (2 people with 57% reactive work)
- Implement "Maker Time" — 4-hour blocks with no meetings so developers can focus
Month 2-3 — act
- Optional tech talks to share knowledge
- Share learnings across squads
- Evaluate whether improvements are working with concrete data
- Propose next steps based on what was learned
Career ladder
A team needs to know where it can grow. Without a clear career ladder, retention becomes a problem.
Levels
| Level | Technical Scope | Impact Scope | Leadership Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| Junior (L1) | Defined tasks, guided code | Individual feature | Learns from others |
| Mid (L2) | Complete features, design with guidance | Squad | Active mentee, seeks feedback |
| Senior (L3) | End-to-end systems, defines approach | Multi-squad | Mentor, makes technical decisions |
| Staff (L4) | Organizational architecture, tech strategy | Company | Multiplier, sets hiring bar |
Evaluation dimensions
- Technical Excellence — code quality, architectural decisions, domain knowledge
- Delivery — follow-through, predictability, ability to unblock
- Teamwork & Communication — collaboration, documentation, clear communication
- Business Acumen — understanding the business impact of technical decisions
Implementation
- Assess each engineer to know where they stand
- Define clear roles per level
- Identify what each person needs to grow
- Build an individual development plan, coordinated with People, Finance, and the CTO to evaluate budget, conditions, and timing
This is a first approach with limited context. Once you're inside the organization and know the teams, processes, and culture up close, you can adjust every part of this plan. But as a starting point, it already gives you a structure to move from diagnosis to action.
The key isn't following the plan to the letter — it's having a system that lets you measure, adjust, and improve continuously.
If you want to dig deeper into the metrics I used as reference, check out the DORA framework.