Engineering leads working at startups can often find themselves in the position of needing to translate an engineer’s “this will take three days” into “this will be done by next Thursday.” Ideally, engineers would only work on one thing at a time to reduce the amount of work-in-progress, but a more common scenario looks like them juggling multiple tasks at once that are all high priority. If there is no PM on the team currently and you’re needed to fill that void, that translation can feel more like guesswork than planning. The good news: you can create a lightweight, repeatable process to do it well.