How to run a 1:1 with your manager: the agenda, the questions, and what great looks like

Think about your last 1:1 with your manager. If you spent it walking through project status, you burned your highest-leverage meeting on the one thing every expert says to cut.

This article gives you a complete agenda for the meeting, the questions worth asking your manager, and the prep that makes both work. Use it to rebuild your next 1:1, then let the routine carry it from there.

The operating manual below comes from Kim Scott, who wrote Radical Candor, from the Chief Product Officer of Coda, and from the coach behind the CEOs of OpenAI and Coinbase.

First rule: the meeting belongs to you

Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, is unambiguous about who owns the agenda:

If your manager runs the meeting and you answer questions, you are giving away the best career tool you have. The rest of this article is about what to do with the time instead.

The trap: status updates

Lane Shackleton, Chief Product Officer at Coda, names the most common failure mode outright:

Project talk in a 1:1 creates a game of telephone with everyone who was not there. Status belongs in writing or in team forums. His replacement framing (54:26): it is their time, and anything they need to unblock a decision or make progress is what the time is for.

Camille Fournier, author of The Manager's Path, adds the boundary that matters when calendars get cut (40:47 in her Lenny's episode): trim peer and stakeholder meetings if you must, but hold the manager 1:1 sacred, weekly or every other week.

What great looks like: the Mochary Method agenda

Matt Mochary coaches the CEOs of companies like Coinbase and OpenAI, and he publishes his full 1:1 template, specific down to the minute counts. It was built for CEOs and their reports, but the structure works at any level. Three sections, in order: accountability, coaching, transparency.

Two details from the template do most of the work. First, everything is written before the meeting, ideally 24 hours ahead, and both people read it before the call, so the live time goes to decisions. Second, the middle step of the issue format ("what I did to help create the situation") does most of the work: once you name your own part in the problem, you can usually see a fix that is in your control.

Mochary's framing for the feedback section is worth quoting directly from his curriculum: "Please share the thought that you think will be most painful for me to hear. That is the feedback that will be most useful to me." You do not have to open there with your manager. But asking for a bit more candor than you are getting is how the relationship deepens over time.

The questions worth asking

The feedback question

Kim Scott says employees should have a go-to question for their manager and rotate the phrasing (40:11): "What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?" She also argues managers should budget the last five minutes of every 1:1 to solicit feedback themselves (39:28), so if yours does not, you can run that play in reverse.

The career question

Julie Zhuo, author of The Making of a Manager, is specific about how promotions actually start in 1:1s:

And the follow-up question that turns an aspiration into a plan (1:06:30): "What does it take? What are the skills I need to get better at in order for you to believe I could be successful?" That question turns your manager from a judge into a coach with a shared list.

The coaching question

Christian Idiodi of Silicon Valley Product Group works with product people who quietly get no coaching at all, often because managers assume strong hires do not need it. His advice on the Product Therapy podcast (6:54): be curious before you get frustrated, and ask for coaching explicitly. His reasoning:

Closing the meeting

Executive coach Alisa Cohn ends every meeting, 1:1s included, with the same three questions:

Ten seconds of ritual, and you stop re-deciding the same things every week. Mochary's version is stricter: every decision becomes an action with an owner and a due date, copied into the task tracker before you stand up.

Cadence, and the honest counterargument

Default answer: weekly or biweekly, 30 to 50 minutes, held sacred (Fournier). Mochary's timeboxed version, via CEO coach Sabrina Wang, runs 50 minutes every other week with the splits in the agenda above.

The counterpoint comes from Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering at Shopify, who canceled his scheduled 1:1s entirely:

What he kept were the unscheduled ones: knocking on his manager's door with a real problem. His complaint targets the content-free status meeting Shackleton called an anti-pattern. If your 1:1 runs on an agenda like the one above, the critique does not apply to it.

Quarterly: the bigger questions

Once a quarter, Mochary's template swaps the routine for what he calls magic questions, each scored 1 to 5, with one follow-up: what would make it a 4 or 5? How do you feel about life at work? Personal life? Your setup? How the company is performing? Working with the team? Working with me? Run these with your manager in either direction. Low scores with a concrete "here is what would raise it" attached are the most productive conversation you will have all quarter.

Your prep checklist