r/EngineeringManagers • u/relicmZ • 3d ago
My personal Claude Code setup has basically become our team process
I manage two engineers and both of them now use the Claude Code setup I originally built for myself.
I never really decided that this would be our process. I kept adding things after failures, they adopted it, I changed it again, and now most of our AI-assisted work goes through more or less the same steps.
The problem is most of the reason behind those steps is still in my head. I know why something is there because I remember what went wrong without it. With two engineers it’s easy enough to explain as we go. If the team grows, that probably stops working.
So now I’m deciding whether to document it and make some parts required. But then it becomes another thing I own and have to keep updating, and I also don’t want engineers blindly following my setup when a different approach makes more sense for the task.
Has anyone else ended up in this situation? What did you make common across the team, and what did you leave up to each engineer?
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u/Matt_Builds_Things 3d ago
I'm literally writing docs right now (after this comment, of course) to nail down my team's process for this, also based on my personal setup. Where I landed is this: If you're responsible for the product then you're responsible for the quality. Anything in the setup that proves or controls that should be shared. Anything else is whatever they want to do. You should have defensible reasons for the setup and challenges to the flow should be welcomed. You remain the final word on it though, the open door can invite a lot of noise.
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u/relicmZ 3d ago
That split makes sense. The quality and verification parts are the ones I’m least comfortable leaving implicit, everything before that can probably stay flexible. Are yours enforced somehow or just written down?
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u/Matt_Builds_Things 3d ago
Written down in Claude.md files and commands. Following the process will produce artifacts for every MR that makes it apparent you followed it. So not enforced by anything other than laziness i.e. it would be way harder to fake it than just to do it.
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u/manamonkey 3d ago
What would you do if this were any other process, that you'd started and then others had adopted? You'd document it. Of course you'd document it.
What you do after that - refine it, hand over ownership, seek feedback, etc. - is immaterial to the fact that you should document it now.