01
Run the team
Conflicts, a slipping deadline, a senior who is drifting away. Halfway through, AI coding agents join your team and change what your people do. Every decision changes what happens next.
Your own words For first-time Engineering Managers
The flight simulator for the next generation of Engineering Leaders.
Pilots practise in a simulator before they fly with passengers. New managers practise on real people. LeadSim gives you a simulated team to run, feedback as you go, and a private report at the end.
Decide in your own words
Feedback as you play
Report your boss never sees
LeadSim · sample scene
Week 6 of 12
The build has been red since lunch.
The demo is Monday. Julia owns the failing integration and has said “done today” twice this week. Marek could fix it, but he leaves for two weeks tomorrow. You could fix it yourself tonight, in about two hours.
Your words stay private
LOCK IT IN
Coaching note · right after
Fast, and it works tonight. But Julia just learned what happens when she gets stuck: you take it. Watch what she does next time.
Consequence · Week 9
Same integration, red again. Julia doesn't try. She waits for you to take it, like last time. The report quotes your Thursday message as the moment this started.
How it works
A quarter of managing a team.
In a few hours, at your own pace.
You get a team of five engineers, a deadline and problems that pile up the way they do in real life. You decide what to do. The simulation reacts, and you learn from what happens next.
02
Get feedback as you go
After your decisions you get short coaching notes: what you just did, what it may cost you later, what else you could have done. You learn while playing, not only at the end.
Coaching notes03
Read your report
A private report on the patterns in how you manage, with your own decisions quoted as evidence. Play again in six months and see what changed.
Private reportWhy
Management has no staging environment.
You get promoted for technical skill. Then you learn the new job on live people, and the feedback comes months later, often as a resignation.
60%
of new managers fail within their first two years. Most got no training for the role.
Gartner research, via Wharton (2024)
Gartner research, via Wharton (2024)
70%
of the variation in how engaged a team is comes down to its manager. After the promotion, that is you.
Gallup, State of the American Manager
Gallup, State of the American Manager
01
Your mistakes feel
Your mistakes feel
like good decisions.
Fixing it yourself feels helpful. Avoiding a hard conversation feels kind. The cost shows up later, when the habit is already set.
02
Courses give you knowledge.
Courses give you knowledge.
You need practice.
Knowing what a hard conversation should look like is not the same as having it when the deadline is slipping.
Across 335 studies of leadership training, practice with feedback had about three times the effect of lectures alone. Lacerenza et al., Journal of Applied Psychology (2017)
03
Nobody shows you
Nobody shows you
what you are doing.
People review what you ship, not how you manage. You cannot see your own blind spots by thinking harder.
Make the mistakes here.
Before the real team pays for them.
Your report
Not who you are.
What you did.
A few pages on the patterns in how you manage, each backed by a decision you actually made, quoted word for word. No personality test. Below is a fragment of a real report from the founder's own run.
Research finds the popular leadership "styles" overlap so heavily that the label tells you little. So the report looks at what you did, not which type you are. Hoch et al., Journal of Management (2018)
Private report · excerpt from a real runReader: you. Not your boss, not HR.
The pattern across your quarter
“You moved fast when the problem was external and went quiet when it was sitting across from you.”
83%scope delivered
1engineer left the team
8 / 11signals from the team ignored
3 / 4promises made without a plan
One expensive decision · Week 5
“Please take the time off. We will handle the release.”
Kasia had an accident. The kind call was the right one. But nobody took over her work, and a junior who overworks to prove herself picked it up quietly. That pattern ran unchecked into the launch crunch. The report shows both sides and what came next.
The report cannot flatter you. It can only name patterns from a fixed list of 35, written before you played, and it has to quote your own words as proof. If one run was not enough to be sure, it says so.
Private by design
The report is yours. Not your boss’s.
If your boss could read it, you would play the version of yourself that gets promoted. So the report goes to you, not to your company.
Your company can pay for the run. It never sees the report.
An employer who buys places sees who completed the run, nothing more. No decisions, no patterns, no dashboards.
Nobody else reads your run, except to keep LeadSim working.
I, the founder, look at run data only to fix a problem or stop misuse. Pilot participants also agreed that I read their runs to prepare our conversations and improve the product.
Your decisions are not training data.
Runs go through the Anthropic API, which does not train on your data.
For learning, not for judging.
LeadSim must not be used for hiring, promotion or performance decisions.
Behind LeadSim
Built by someone who has watched this fail dozens of times.
Michał Orzechowski
Founder · LeadSim · 20 years in software engineering · Mentor to IC-to-manager transitions
Twenty years inside software engineering organizations, watching the same scene: a strong individual contributor gets promoted, everyone crosses their fingers, and six months later the team is fragile and nobody can point to what went wrong. LeadSim makes the cause visible before it costs you a person, a quarter, or both.
“LeadSim is the tool I wished I had when I was promoting people who deserved the opportunity but weren't ready for the reality.”Connect on LinkedIn
FAQ
Before you sign up.
Is this a course or a game?
Neither. A course gives you knowledge. A game gives you a score. LeadSim gives you a team to run, feedback on your decisions while you run it, and a report on your patterns at the end. It is practice with a mirror.
How much time does it take?
One run covers a quarter of a team's life and takes a few hours in total. You play at your own pace: stop, come back, continue.
Can my employer see my results?
No. Your employer can pay for your place, but your decisions and your report go only to you. A company that pays sees that you completed the run, nothing more.
Can I still join the pilot?
No. The Q4 pilot is closed and running now. What I learn from it goes into LeadSim before the next step: the founding cohort, the first group of users after the pilot. There is no fixed date yet. Join the waitlist and you will get an email when it opens.
Why only software engineering?
Because the details matter. The team, the trade-offs, the delivery pressure and the AI coding agents are the real environment of an Engineering Manager today.
Founding cohort
The pilot is closed. The waitlist is open.
The Q4 pilot is full and running. Next comes the founding cohort, the first group of LeadSim users after the pilot.
What you sign up for. One email when the founding cohort opens, so you hear about it first. No newsletter. You can unsubscribe at any time.