Questions for managers and team leads to use in key people conversations: 1on1 meetings, hiring, firing, feedback, and performance reviews.
This repository contains practical, ready-to-use questions that help you support your team, improve communication, and make better people decisions.
We try to keep the questions concrete and the lists intentionally short - even though in the age of AI it’s easy to generate hundreds of questions, we only include ones that have been tested in real conversations by experienced managers.
A structured set of question lists for different types of manager conversations:
Each folder includes focused questions designed for real situations - not theory.
Good questions help you:
- guide 1-on-1 meetings with clarity
- support people’s growth and development
- uncover issues early
- improve feedback and performance discussions
- make fair hiring and firing decisions
Use them as a guide or mix-and-match depending on the situation.
- Pick the ones most relevant for your conversation
- Don’t feel obligated to ask everything in one meeting
- Listen actively and follow up with actions
- Adapt questions to your team’s context
These questions are meant to improve real conversations, strengthen trust, and support growth.
- Engineering managers
- Team leads
- People managers
- Founders and team owners
- Build and maintain a clear competency matrix in one place
- Track skills, spot gaps, and share public or private matrices
- Assess and present your skills using a transparent matrix
- Boost your CV with a clean PDF summary that replaces generic skill bullet points
Contributions are welcome!
If you have questions that worked well in real conversations or helped improve clarity and ownership, feel free to open a pull request or discussion.
- Open an issue
- Submit a pull request
- Share feedback
MIT