The Cadence Calendar
your first 90 days as a rhythm
Two different things live in this document. Part 1 is the standing cadence: the rhythm your team runs on once it's set up, compiled from the four playbooks that already rule it. Nothing here is invented; each line is cited to the playbook that decided it. Part 2 is when, inside your first 90 days, each piece of this kit first gets used. That's a sequencing choice, not a new standing cadence: the kit doesn't add rituals the playbooks don't already have.
Part 1 — The Ruled Cadences, Compiled
| Ritual | Cadence | Who's in the room | Ruled in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1:1s | Weekly, every direct report, thirty minutes | Manager and report | The 1:1 Playbook |
| Feedback (giving) | Continuous. Said within days of the moment, not saved for a scheduled event | Whoever's involved | The Giving Feedback Playbook |
| Feedback (receiving and follow-through checkpoints) | Continuous as it arrives; recurring checkpoints get tied to a rhythm you already have, like the standing 1:1, rather than a separate meeting | Whoever's involved | The Receiving Feedback Playbook |
| Review | Fixed cadence: weekly, every other week, or monthly, depending on the team and how fast things change. Every two weeks is the default absent a reason to run differently | Team, plus stakeholders and sponsors for the demo | The Review Playbook |
| Retrospective | Between the review and the next planning session, after one and before the other | Team only | The Retrospective Playbook |
| AI Operating Model revisit | Quarterly, and after any agent incident | Team | The AI Operating Model for Teams |
A note on the feedback rows: the three feedback playbooks (Giving, Receiving, and Soliciting) publish as separate pages. Both cadences above hold regardless of which page they live on.
Part 2 — When Each Kit Asset First Deploys
This is sequencing, not a new cadence. The standing rituals in Part 1 don't change speed during your first 90 days; what changes is which of them is running yet, and when the kit's own templates and diagnostics get their first use.
Days 1–7. 1:1s go on the calendar this week and start the weekly rhythm immediately. Feedback is live from day one; nothing to schedule. The Maturity Model and Self-Assessment run once, this week, as a starting read, not a recurring ritual.
Days 7–30. The AI Operating Model gets filled in and handed to the team as the week-1-to-30 reference document. The Pre-Flight Checklist gets walked once, this window, against the rollouts already running, the audit use rather than a pre-launch one.
First natural cycle (typically inside days 14–30, per the review default above). The first Review runs on whatever cadence you and the team settle on. The first Retrospective follows it, before the next planning session. From here forward, Review and Retro repeat on their standing cadence from Part 1, not a kit-specific one.
Days 30–60. The Definition of Verified gets stood up and filled in with the team's actual work types. The verification-debt and comprehension-debt audit signals get checked once, together, against real recent work, then folded into ongoing review and retro conversations rather than run as a separate standing ritual.
Days 60–90. The Agent Incident Runbook gets filled in, before an incident, not after one. By the end of this window, the standing cadence from Part 1 should be running as one system: 1:1s weekly, review on its own cycle, retro right behind it, feedback continuous underneath all three — not four separate things happening in isolation.
Ongoing, past day 90. The AI Operating Model gets revisited quarterly, and again after any agent incident, per its own ruled line. Nothing else on this calendar has a defined revisit cadence yet; that's a fair question to raise at your first quarterly Operating Model revisit, not something this calendar decides for you.
See Also
The New Engineering Leader's Kit for why each of these assets is in the flow at all. The New Engineering Leader's Question Bank for what to actually ask inside each of these windows.