Augmented Mind · Course · By role

The 12-week arc, by role

The same Walk → Run → Fly arc reads differently depending on what your job is. Six paths through the curriculum. Same weeks, different emphasis, different assignments to take most seriously.

Pick the role that’s closest to yours. Run the full curriculum if you want; the per-role notes tell you which weeks are load-bearing for your job and which are reference.

Engineering IC — the default path

Both courses end-to-end, as written. AM Course Walk → Run first; AH Course Run → Fly if and when you want to scale past 3 parallel sessions.

Most-load-bearing weeks: AM W1 (repo-as-context), AM W2 (operating routines), AH W2 (tooling stack), and AH W5 (the emotional spine, which is where most ICs plateau).

Optional: the for-engineering-leaders supplement if you’re curious about the team-shape and cross-org dimensions your tech lead is dealing with.

Tech lead

Both courses end-to-end, plus heavier weight on the coordination + political layers. Specifically:

  • AM W3 (the 10×-everything chapter) — you’re the one who has to make the lockstep-scaling argument to adjacent functions.
  • AM W5 (calibrated quality + political layer) — your conversations with managers and process owners depend on this.
  • AH W4 (coordination patterns — Team Ops sweep, cross-stream context sharing, ambient sync) — you’re orchestrating not just your own fleet but the team’s coordination substrate.
  • AH W5 (the emotional spine) — you’re the one your team turns to when brain-fry hits.
  • The for-engineering-leaders supplement on cross-org political layer + team composition.

Engineering Manager

AM Course end-to-end, plus the for-engineering-leaders supplement. The AH Course is worth skimming so you understand what a flying-stage IC on your team is actually doing day-to-day, but it’s not the load-bearing material for your role.

  • AM W3 (10×-everything) is where your support-function negotiation work starts. The upgrade-plan assignment is the one to do in your role.
  • AM W5 (political layer) is the majority of your job during adoption. The push-back proposal is the one to do.
  • AM W6 (synthesis + team graduation demo) is the most important week for showing leadership what the team has installed.
  • For-engineering-leaders supplement: the cross-org political layer + team-composition sections are written for your role directly.

PM

AM Course with a product-management lens. You’ll ship PRs in the new world (AM W4). Your discovery work flows through the repo. Your release notes become Friday-demo material.

  • AM W1 (repo-as-context) applies to product docs, decision logs, customer feedback. Same flip: PRDs in markdown in the repo, not in Confluence.
  • AM W2 (operating routines) — the transcription pipeline matters for user-research sessions and customer calls. Browser automation matters for your dashboard work.
  • AM W4 (cross-discipline expansion) is your week. PMs shipping code is one of the Week 4 deliverables.
  • AM W5 (calibrated quality + the political layer) — your conversations with engineering about what to polish and what to ship rough live here.

Designer

Similar shape to PM. Designers shipping code is one of the Week 4 deliverables. The user-research transcription pattern is yours to install too.

  • AM W2 — the transcription pipeline is your main near-term tool. User interviews feeding directly into Claude as context for design decisions changes how research compounds.
  • AM W4 (cross-discipline expansion) — designers writing the first pass of a component, designers shipping minor UI tweaks themselves, designers prototyping in code.
  • AM W5 (calibrated quality) — design polish has its own per-surface calibration (internal mocks rough is fine; customer-facing polish bar is high). The chapter framing applies directly.

Growth ops / lifecycle / marketing

AM Course with a growth-ops lens. The same patterns apply: markdown-as-source-of-truth, transcript-fed planning, parallel work-streams, ultra-fast iteration. Marketing campaigns, lifecycle automations, partner onboarding flows are all parallelizable in the same shape as engineering work.

  • AM W1 (repo-as-context) — campaign briefs, audience definitions, attribution rules — all in the repo as markdown rather than scattered across Notion / Asana / spreadsheets.
  • AM W4 (ultra-fast iteration) is the most directly applicable week. The almost-never-say-no reflex applies to growth experiments more than to most engineering work.
  • AM W5 (calibrated quality per surface) — customer-facing emails get polish; internal A/B test setups can stay rough.
  • AM W6 (graduation) — demo the growth experiments shipped under the new cadence vs the old.

How to use this page

Read your role’s notes first. Then start the AM Course at Week 1. The course itself is engineering-shaped in places, but the principles apply across roles — this page tells you which weeks you should slow down on and which you can skim.

If your role isn’t listed and you’d like a per-role pass added — reply to one of the newsletter posts or email me. Future versions of this page will expand as more roles surface clear patterns through the curriculum.