// Getting it approved

How to expense engineering manager training.

Most companies will cover this through their learning and development budget. What stops it is almost never the money. It is that the request arrives without anything the person approving it can forward, and management training is the easiest line to defer when nobody has explained what happens if you do not do it.

This page is what to send and what to say. There is a one-pager at the bottom written for the person who has to approve it rather than for you.

Download the one-pager → See what it costs

Does it qualify as professional development?

Yes, on the two tests most L&D policies actually apply. It is structured training with defined content rather than a conference ticket or a subscription to read things, and it is directly relevant to the job you are being paid to do. It is delivered online and designed to fit around a full-time role, so there is no time away from work and no travel cost, which is usually the expensive part of sending somebody on a course.

Finance normally wants two things. An invoice or receipt suitable for expense and reimbursement, which is provided, and a predictable cost, which at $790 a year it is. The annual plan is the one to put on a training budget: it works out at two months free versus paying monthly, and it lands as a single line rather than a recurring one somebody has to keep re-approving.

What to actually say

The mistake is arguing that you want to get better at management. That is true and it is not an argument, because it puts the benefit with you rather than with the team. The version that gets approved names the cost the business is already carrying.

Getting the people side of management wrong is expensive, and almost none of that cost ever appears as a line item. The mistakes are quiet ones. A difficult conversation delayed until it becomes a resignation. A strong engineer whose 1-1s stopped being useful, who starts looking elsewhere. A manager who keeps doing the technical work themselves and becomes the bottleneck for the whole team.

Any one of those costs the business significantly more than a year of this. Replacing a single mid-level engineer typically runs to several months of their salary once you count recruitment, notice, ramp-up and lost delivery. A performance issue left to run for two quarters costs more again. The business is carrying that risk already. This is the small, predictable cost of reducing it.

A year of this membership costs significantly less than a fortnight of a single engineer's salary. Replacing that engineer when they leave costs months of it.

It is also low-risk to approve, and it is worth saying so explicitly, because the person signing it off is the one carrying the risk of it being a waste. Membership can be cancelled within the first 14 days if it is not the right fit. And if a member follows the work for 30 days and still does not feel able to handle these situations more confidently, they get four weekly 1-1 sessions at no extra cost.

What they are approving

It is a membership rather than a one-off course, so the material keeps pace with what the manager is actually dealing with instead of going stale six weeks after it is bought.

The core programme

Seven professionally edited, self-paced video modules, with new courses added at least every six months.
A worksheet and template bundle: one-to-one documents, listening-tour templates, prioritisation matrices and review formats, with video walkthroughs.
An AI management simulator for rehearsing the conversations that matter. Members practise feedback, underperformance, conflict and managing up against a realistic AI, get a coaching debrief, and can run it again before doing it for real with their own team.

Ongoing development

Monthly long-form deep-dive articles written for practitioners.
Monthly live office hours.
A searchable Q&A library: real questions from working managers, answered on video and added to every month.
An expert interview series with senior engineering leaders from companies including Google, Meta, GitHub and HBO, with a new one every month.

Community and access

A private peer community of practising engineering managers at every level.
Direct access to Ryan, who members can message at any time about a specific problem or decision they are facing.

It is run by Ryan Murphy, who has nearly twenty years in software engineering and built and led engineering teams at Yelp. He is a six-time top-rated instructor at Dometrain, served two years on the LeadDev programme committee, speaks at LeadDev and CTO Craft, and writes to an audience of over 80,000 engineers and engineering leaders each week.

The numbers

$790 per year, two months free versus monthly. Annual members keep the EM Playbook course forever, even after membership ends.

$79 per month, if a rolling cost suits your budget better than an annual one.

$349 one-off for the EM Playbook course on its own, yours to keep. Course content only, no membership extras.

An invoice or receipt suitable for expense and reimbursement is provided for finance. For questions on billing, invoicing or enrolling several managers at once, email ryan@emaccelerator.com. If you are looking to train a whole team rather than yourself, on-site workshops are usually the better route.

The bit that does the work

Send them the one-pager.

Three pages, written for the person approving it rather than for you. What it is, the business case, what is included, and the cost. Forward it with a line saying you would like to expense it, and let the document make the argument.