Marc has been managing engineers for eight months. Before that, five years as a senior engineer — a good one. Thoughtful code, solid instincts, the kind of person you wanted reviewing your pull request.
His 1-1s are thirty minutes, every two weeks. He opens them the same way: "So, how's the sprint going?"
He means well. He prepared nothing specific because he already knows the sprint status — it's in Jira, it was in the standup. But it's a safe opener. Concrete. Technical. The territory he knows.
What follows is usually a status update neither of them needed. The thirty minutes pass. Marc marks it done. He's a manager who has 1-1s. That counts, right?
There is a widespread and understandable confusion about what a 1-1 is for.
The confusion comes from where most engineering managers start: they were engineers first. They were promoted because they were good — technically sharp, reliable, respected by peers. Then someone handed them a calendar full of meetings and a team to "manage," without much else in the way of instruction. So they do what they know. They talk about the work.
The work is safe. The work is measurable. Talking about the sprint feels productive in a way that's hard to argue with. And talking about anything else — the person's mood, their frustration, their ambitions, whether they're thinking about leaving — feels like overreach, or therapy, or something vaguely uncomfortable that nobody modeled for them.
So the 1-1 becomes a project sync with two participants.
What a 1-1 is actually for is the person.
Not the sprint. Not the backlog. Not the upcoming deadline Marc is quietly anxious about. The person sitting across from him — or on the other end of the call — who has a life, goals, a context that extends well beyond the current ticket.
The shift starts with a different kind of opening question. Not "how's the sprint going?" — but "how are you doing?" — and meaning it, and waiting for the answer. It sounds small. It isn't. It signals that the next thirty minutes are for the person, not the project.
The best version of this meeting that Marc hasn't had yet doesn't happen in the office at all. It happens at a café nearby, removed from the screen and the Jira board and the ambient pressure of the building. Camille, who does run 1-1s this way, would tell him: the change of setting changes everything. People talk differently when they're not sitting in a conference room.
The deeper issue isn't the opener, though. It's that Marc has no map of the person.
He knows what Ann is working on. He doesn't know where Ann wants to be in a year. He doesn't know whether she's energized or quietly depleted. He doesn't know that she's been offered a talk at a local meetup and isn't sure she should say yes. He doesn't know any of this because he's never asked, and because building that map never felt like it was part of the job.
It is the job. The 1-1 is the primary instrument for building it.
Over time — not in one meeting, but over months — a manager who actually uses 1-1s well accumulates a real picture of each person: what they care about professionally, what friction they're experiencing that they wouldn't say in a team meeting, what would make the next six months meaningful for them rather than just survivable. That picture changes how everything else gets managed — what work gets assigned, what support gets offered, what conversations happen before problems become exits.
The meeting becomes, in practice, part catching-up and part career management. Mostly listening. Occasionally a reflection or a direct observation, offered carefully. The manager speaks perhaps a third of the time, if that.
Marc isn't a bad manager. He's an engineer who was handed a new job and defaulted to the tools he already had.
The uncomfortable truth is that most engineering management training is either nonexistent or focused on process — OKRs, performance cycles, headcount planning. The part about actually knowing the people you manage, about being genuinely curious about their context, about understanding that morale isn't a vibe but a signal with causes — that part is usually left to chance, or to having had a good manager yourself at some point.
Some people get lucky. They had a manager who took them to a café and asked how they were doing and actually listened. They learned what a 1-1 could be by experiencing one.
Most didn't. Most are Marc, doing their best with the wrong mental model, opening every meeting the same way, slowly losing the signal they most need to hear.
The sprint status will always be available somewhere else. The person in the room won't tell you what they're not saying unless you make space for it.
That's what the 1-1 is for.
Thomas Riboulet is a Fractional VP of Engineering working with European tech companies. He writes about engineering leadership, team structure, and sustainable delivery at insights.wa-systems.eu.