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 first-time Engineering Managers.
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 only you can read
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)
01
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. You need practice.
Knowing what a hard conversation should look like is not the same as having it when the deadline is slipping.
03
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.
Not on real people.
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.
Private report · excerpt from a real runReader: you. That is the entire list.
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. Only yours.
If your boss could read it, you would play the version of yourself that gets promoted. So the report goes to you and stops there.
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.
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.
What does the pilot cost?
Nothing. The price of a place is three short conversations with me during your run, so I can learn what worked and what did not. After the pilot, LeadSim becomes a paid product.
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.
September pilot
Ten places. The waitlist is open.
A full run, your private report and a direct line to me while LeadSim is still being shaped.
The deal is simple. The pilot is free. In return, we talk three times during your run about what happened and how it felt. Places go by fit, not by queue. I read every entry myself and reply personally.