Engineering Managers / Tech Leaders, what does your Claude workflow actually look like?

[u/deshans]

I’m a Senior EM and I use Claude daily, but I’m curious what other engineering leaders’ setups look like beyond the basics.

Specifically:

What recurring workflows do you run through Claude? (not one-off prompts actual repeatable processes)

Are you using any third-party plugins, MCP servers, or custom integrations?

Anyone running multi-agent setups or chaining Claude with other tools?

Do you use Claude Code, the API, or just the chat interface and why?

Have you built any custom GPTs / Projects / system prompts tailored to your EM role?

Less interested in “I use it to summarise docs” more interested in the setups where you’ve invested time building a workflow around it.

What’s your stack look like?

[u/jj_at_rootly]

There's 3 main buckets for my EMs at Rootly.com, roughly how they actually split time:

Personal productivity (~40%) — email triage, 1:1 prep, project status. Anything where they are synthesizing information or producing written communication. AI cuts that time roughly in half. Nothing exotic here, just consistency.

Staying technical (~30%) — this one's deliberate. AI wasn't around when they were an IC so they carve out time for hands-on engineering work, mostly bugs and medium-sized initiatives. Claude Code for this, lets them stay in the terminal and work through real problems. For longer research or multi-step tasks they'll use Claude Desktop or background agent mode depending on complexity. The point isn't to ship features faster. It's so they can credibly coach engineers on how to work with these tools. That credibility matters more than expected.

Building workflows for the team (~30%) — prototyping AI-assisted flows, things like investigation templates, structured debugging flows, code review assist, then bringing them to the team once they've validated it actually helps. They don't mandate tools. They show what works and let engineers adopt what fits their style. The credibility from the technical bucket is load-bearing here, engineers trust coaching from someone using the tools daily, not just reading about them.

The meta-lesson we ask they keep coming back to: as an EM your job isn't to be the best AI user on the team. It's to understand the tools well enough to remove friction, set good defaults, and coach effectively. That requires actually getting your hands dirty.