Your review said “be more proactive.” Nobody told you what that means.
This turns “proactive” into 15 observable engineering behaviours: how you clarify work, surface risk, move decisions, close handoffs and prove outcomes. Count what you actually did in the last three weeks.
15 questions · no email · answers stay in this browser
What “proactive” means here
In this diagnostic, proactive engineering means reducing the amount of invisible coordination other people must do around your work. You make outcomes explicit, expose changing risk while there is time to act, bring bounded next steps, and close what you open.
See all 15 behaviours
- Write down the outcome of a task in plain language, before naming any technology.
- Name an assumption that could invalidate my work, before building on it.
- Check whether a decision was mine to make, mine to inform, or one I needed approved.
- Flag a risk that had changed while the team still had time to act on it.
- Ask for help with what I expected, what I observed, and what I had already tried.
- Send an update that reported a changed state instead of logging my activity.
- Bring a recommendation or a bounded next step instead of only a problem.
- Open a pull request that stated its outcome, risk, verification, and scope.
- Close a handoff with a named owner and a date.
- Verify rollout, adoption, or operational readiness after a merge.
- Remove a source of repeated friction instead of absorbing it again.
- Say no to work by putting the trade-off on the table.
- Protect a block of focused work without going dark on the team.
- Record evidence of an outcome, a prevented risk, or a system I improved.
- Stop or hand off an initiative when the evidence, priority, or permission changed.
Before you start
How is the score calculated?
Each behaviour is counted over the last three weeks: never = 0, once = 1, twice = 2, three or more = 3. Fifteen questions produce a score from 0 to 45.
Does this reward extroversion?
No. The behaviours are about making work legible and closed, not speaking more, dominating meetings or becoming louder.
Is this a personality or psychometric test?
No. It is a practical self-audit of recent workplace behaviours. Use the result as a pattern to inspect, not a label about who you are.
In the last three weeks, how many times did I…
If you are hesitating, use the lower count. This works better as evidence than aspiration.
What that number means
The three behaviours to make visible first
The other twelve behaviours — and what to do about them
Ticket Taker, Outcome Owner expands the full system behind these fifteen behaviours: the SCOPE loop, scripts for asking for the next level, saying no with a trade-off and disagreeing with your manager, plus a 21-day plan and field cards.
Tell me your score and I’ll read it back to you.
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