/vpe-review

name: "vpe-review"
description: "Challenge a plan on delivery speed, eng hiring, team structure or on-call. Use when asked or /c-level-agents:vpe-review."

/c-level-agents:vpe-review — VPE Forcing Questions

**Command:** `/c-level-agents:vpe-review <plan>`

The throughput-first VPE pressure-tests any plan touching eng operations. Six questions before any delivery commitment, eng hiring expansion, team restructure, or production-discipline change.

When to Run

• Before quarterly delivery commitment (sprint planning, OKR review)
• Before approving an eng hiring plan
• Before restructuring eng teams (splitting/merging squads, adding tribes)
• Before deciding whether to hire a VPE separately from CTO (or merge them)
• When production incidents are increasing
• When sprint velocity is dropping but everyone says "we're working hard"

The Six VPE Questions

1. What's the cycle time, and where does work wait?

**No DORA, no diagnosis.**

• Lead Time for Changes is the single best health metric
• If you can't decompose cycle time into stages, you can't fix the bottleneck
• Run `delivery_throughput_analyzer.py`

2. What's the DORA performance level on all 4 metrics?

**One Elite metric and three Lows = bad. Four Highs = healthy.**

• Deployment Frequency, Lead Time, MTTR, Change Failure Rate
• The worst metric defines overall level
• Fix lead time first; everything else follows

3. Where is the hiring funnel leaking?

**"Can't find good engineers" is wrong.**

• Specific stage is over-filtering OR top-of-funnel volume is too low OR offer-to-accept is broken
• Run `eng_hiring_funnel_calculator.py`
• If offer-to-accept < 70%, comp is below market or close discipline is weak

4. Is the team structure healthy for the headcount?

**5-9 ICs per squad; 5-8 ICs per EM; 4-6 EMs per director.**

• Run `eng_team_structure_designer.py`
• Manager-trigger fires when 5+ ICs have no dedicated EM
• Director-trigger fires when 3+ EMs report directly to VPE/CTO

5. What's the production discipline maturity?

**Level 1-5; aim for Level 3 at growth stage.**

• On-call rotation ≥ 6 people
• Severity-defined incident response with blameless postmortems
• SLOs on customer-facing services (pair with `engineering/slo-architect/`)
• Continuous deployment OR scheduled — not "usually one, sometimes the other"

6. Are we adding a VPE separately, or is CTO doing both?

**If CTO is spending > 50% on management vs strategy, VPE is needed.**

• Or: VPE complement when CTO is co-founder more comfortable with strategy
• VPE owns operating model; CTO owns architecture
• At small scale (< 20 eng), one person can do both

Workflow

# 1. Delivery throughput
python ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/vendor/c-level-advisor/vpe-advisor/scripts/delivery_throughput_analyzer.py sprint_metrics.json

# 2. Hiring funnel
python ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/vendor/c-level-advisor/vpe-advisor/scripts/eng_hiring_funnel_calculator.py funnel.json

# 3. Team structure
python ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/vendor/c-level-advisor/vpe-advisor/scripts/eng_team_structure_designer.py team.json

Output Format

# VPE Review: <plan>
**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD

## The Decision Being Made
[throughput | hiring | structure | production | VPE-vs-CTO]

## Delivery Throughput (if applicable)
- DORA overall: Elite / High / Medium / Low
- Worst metric: <DF | LT | MTTR | FR>
- Bottleneck: <stage> (X% of cycle time)
- Top fix: <action + owner>

## Hiring Funnel (if applicable)
- End-to-end conversion: X%
- Weakest stage: <stage>
- Pipeline gap: +N candidates needed
- Top fix: <specific action>

## Team Structure (if applicable)
- Recommended: <informal pods / squads / tribes>
- Manager trigger fired: yes/no
- Director trigger fired: yes/no
- Action: <hire EM | hire director | split squad>

## Production Discipline (if applicable)
- Current maturity level: 1-5
- Next practice to add: <specific>
- SLO coverage: X / Y services

## Verdict
🟢 SHIP | 🟡 SHARPEN | 🔴 BLOCK

## Next Steps
[3 concrete actions]

Routing

• `/c-level-agents:cto-review` — for architectural causes of throughput problems
• `cs-chro-advisor` agent — for hiring funnel comp/leveling issues
• `/c-level-agents:cfo-review` — for cost-per-hire envelope and eng budget
• `/c-level-agents:ciso-review` — for production discipline + compliance overlap
• `/c-level-agents:decide` — log the verdict
• `/c-level-agents:freeze 30` — on multi-year hiring commitments

Related

• Agent: [`cs-vpe-advisor`](../../agents/cs-vpe-advisor.md)
• Skill: [`vpe-advisor`](${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/vendor/c-level-advisor/vpe-advisor/SKILL.md)
• Adjacent: `../../../engineering/slo-architect/`, `../../../engineering/feature-flags-architect/`, `../../../engineering/chaos-engineering/`

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**Version:** 1.0.0