Claude Code to manage engineering teams (www.devashish.me)

AI-powered individual contributors are moving faster, but team throughput often stalls because planning, reviews and allocation remain human-speed coordination bottlenecks. A manager reports using Claude Code plugins to automate that coordination layer and turn IC-level speed into team velocity: Planner templates cut bug-clarification time by ~50% and story refinement by ~30% (yielding a ~10% bump in engineering speed), Reviewer persona-agents cut PR cycle time ~20% by delivering specialist feedback pre-PR, and a Manager plugin provides /sprint-report, /team-status and /analyze-retrospective reports to rebalance work and reduce management overhead by half. Together these changes stabilized sprint throughput, reduced burnout, democratized specialist knowledge, and lowered token costs as agents retry less. Technically this is a pragmatic agent orchestration pattern: template-driven ticket creation that enforces context, scope, acceptance criteria and Definition of Done; persona-driven review agents (DevOps, backend, frontend) run locally to catch integration, infra and UX issues before submission; and data-driven sprint analytics that enable corrective actions in seconds. Plugins integrate with GitHub, Jira/Atlassian, Slack, AWS and dev tools and follow a simple repo structure (agents/, commands/, templates/). The recommended rollout is iterative: map your workflow, pick the biggest bottleneck, deploy one plugin, measure, then expand — letting agent knowledge and team patterns compound improvements over months.