For the first two years of my career, my 1:1 with my manager was a thirty-minute status report. I would walk in, list what I had shipped, list what I was about to ship, mention any blockers in a casual tone so I did not look like I was complaining, and leave. He would nod and say “great, anything else?”, and the answer was always no. We both walked out feeling like we had done a productive thing. Neither of us had.
The week I figured out the 1:1 was actually mine, not his, was the week my career started to move. Mine, in the sense that I owned the agenda. Mine, in the sense that the topics that mattered to me, my growth, my doubts, the things I was confused about, were going to come up only if I brought them. My manager had ten of these meetings a week and showed up with no hidden agenda, just a half hour and a willingness to talk about whatever I wanted to talk about.
If you are spending your 1:1 doing what could be a Slack message, you are wasting one of the most leveraged thirty minutes you have at work. Here is how I have learned to use them better.
Own the agenda, in writing, in advance
The single biggest change I made was creating a shared document with my manager. Notion in some jobs, a Google Doc in others. The format does not matter. What matters is that there is a single, persistent place where the agenda lives, and that I am the one who fills it in.
The structure I have settled on:
- A rolling list of dated entries, newest at the top.
- Each entry has two or three bullets I want to talk about, written some time during the week as they occur to me.
- Below those, a “from last time” section with action items either of us committed to, with a checkbox.
- At the bottom, a “parked topics” list of things that are not urgent but I want to remember to bring up eventually.
I write these bullets through the week. Tuesday afternoon, I notice I am stuck on a design decision and I am not sure if it is technical or political; I add a bullet. Wednesday, my skip-level says something cryptic in a meeting; I add a bullet. Thursday, I get feedback from a peer that bothers me; I add a bullet. By the time the 1:1 starts, the agenda has written itself.
The effect is twofold. First, my manager can read the doc before the meeting and walk in with thoughts, which means we are not spending the first ten minutes briefing him. Second, I cannot show up unprepared, because the document is right there, with my name on it, full of things I said I cared about. The accountability runs both ways.
If your manager does not have a 1:1 doc with you yet, suggest one in your next meeting. “I am going to start dropping topics into a shared Notion page so we can use the time better, is that okay?”. Almost no manager will say no to that. Most will be relieved.
Bring problems, not just status
Status belongs in Slack, in standups, in your weekly summary email, in Jira. It does not belong in your 1:1. The reason is simple: status is information your manager could have read in five minutes, and you are spending thirty minutes of their time and yours to deliver it. That is a 6x markup for no extra value.
The reframe I have come to use is “bring problems, not status”. Problems are the things you cannot put in a Slack message because you do not yet know what they are. The half-formed worry. The decision you are stuck on. The technical choice with implications you cannot articulate yet. These benefit from a live conversation with someone who has more context than you.
A 1:1 that goes “this week I shipped X, I am working on Y, no blockers” is wasted. A 1:1 that goes “I am worried we are about to ship the wrong thing on Y, can you help me think through it?” is the most useful kind of meeting either of you will have that week.
The discipline is to notice, during the week, the thoughts that start with “I am worried” or “I am not sure” and capture them in your 1:1 doc instead of trying to resolve them alone. The 1:1 is the place to get someone else’s perspective.
What to actually talk about, over time
If you only ever talk about this-week problems, the 1:1 becomes a tactical clinic and you miss the longer-running stuff. The topics worth coming back to over the course of months:
Career. Where you want to be in two years and what it would take to get there. What promotion looks like at your level and the next one. What kinds of projects would help, what kinds would be a distraction. This is uncomfortable to talk about and it is exactly why it has to come up regularly.
Blockers. Not just the obvious “this PR is stuck waiting for review” kind. The slow, frustrating ones: a team that does not respond, a piece of legacy infrastructure that eats half your week, a process that adds three days to every change. Your manager can sometimes fix these in a single conversation.
Feedback, in both directions. Ask for it specifically. “How did that design review go from your perspective?”. And, more importantly, give it. Your manager has less signal than you think, and the signal you give them is what lets them get better at managing you.
Organisational signal. Your manager hears things you do not. What is the team being pushed to do next quarter? What does your skip-level care about? Most of this is not secret; it just lives in conversations you are not in. Asking is how you get access.
What your manager is worried about. “What are you worried about right now?”. A good manager will tell you, sometimes about the team, sometimes about the org. Suddenly you have shared context, and a way to be useful that goes beyond delivering tickets.
You do not cover all of these in one 1:1. You cover them over months. The “parked topics” section of the agenda is exactly for this: a place to make sure career stuff comes up at least quarterly, even when this week’s fire is bigger.
Make it bidirectional
The other thing I wish I had figured out earlier is that 1:1s are bidirectional. Your manager has a hard job. They are getting feedback from above, sideways, below, and very little of it is calibrated. Your perspective is genuinely useful to them, and most engineers never share it.
Things I now bring up regularly:
- “The last all-hands felt off, here is why.” Specific, not whiny.
- “I noticed you did X in the planning meeting and it landed well, just so you know.”
- “I am finding the way we run sprint planning frustrating, can we talk about it?”. Better than complaining about it for six months and then quitting.
- “I think you are about to make a decision I disagree with, can I lay out why?”. This is the highest-leverage feedback you can give a manager, best delivered in a 1:1 before it gets delivered in a public meeting.
The last point matters. Friction is best surfaced in private, before it becomes public. A manager who hears your disagreement in the 1:1 can adjust. A manager who hears it for the first time in the team meeting will, reasonably, be defensive.
I have had 1:1s where I said calmly “I think this decision is wrong and here are my three reasons”, and the decision changed. I have also had 1:1s where I made the case and the decision did not change, and that was fine, because at least the case had been made. Either outcome beats stewing about it for two months.
What to skip, and the no-agenda rule
A few things the 1:1 is not for, even though it is tempting.
It is not for the standup recap. If you are about to spend ten minutes describing what you did this week, put it in the agenda doc as a bullet instead and use the meeting for something denser.
It is not for ticket-by-ticket walkthroughs of your work. Your manager does not need to know the details of every PR. They need to know the patterns, the risks, and the things that are stuck.
And the rule that has saved me the most time: if there is genuinely nothing in the agenda, cancel the meeting. Send a Slack message. “Nothing pressing this week, let’s reclaim the half hour, ping me if you have something”. A good manager will appreciate it. A great one will sometimes write back with something they wanted to bring up.
The flip side is that “nothing in the agenda” should be rare. If it happens for three weeks in a row, you are not paying attention to your own signal during the week. Open the doc more often. Capture the half-formed worries when they show up.
The 1:1 is yours. Own the agenda, write it in a shared doc through the week, bring problems instead of status, cycle through the longer-running topics over months, give feedback in both directions, surface friction before it becomes public, and cancel the meeting when there is nothing real to discuss. Thirty minutes a week. Followed for years. Compounded with a manager who is paying attention. There is almost no other half-hour in your work calendar with that kind of return.