Manufactured Reps: The Shortcut to Trust

I’ll be blunt. When I started consulting, I had zero pitch experience. Clients wanted someone confident, but I kept hitting a wall—frustrated, doubting if I’d ever actually be trusted to run the room. For a while, it felt like maybe I just wasn’t cut out for it.

Here’s the problem. You can’t build trust without experience, but you can’t magically get experience without someone letting you in. The classic catch-22. If you’re stuck, it’s not because you lack ability. It’s because you haven’t been allowed enough real attempts to prove it.

So we hacked how to practice high-stakes engineering. Instead of waiting for permission or that “right moment,” I started riding along on sales calls just to listen. I’d rehearse pitches in scrappy after-hours sessions with peers who were honest about what landed and what flopped. When a coach was around, I’d ask them to rip apart my approach before an actual client ever saw me. I stopped chasing perfection and focused on being prepared—on building the memory of having done it, even if the setting was half-mock, half-real. It was uncomfortable, but the reps stuck.

What unlocked those pitching skills early on—shadowing, practicing with feedback, simulating the pressure—is exactly how to practice high-stakes engineering. If we rode along on live pitches to gain trust, we can ride along on incidents, migrations, and launches to prepare for technical showdowns. Shadowing, simulation, rehearsal: these aren’t just hacks for consultants; they’re the method for anyone whose output matters under pressure.

When the Moment Hits: Readiness Beats Perfection

Most of us see these high-impact moments coming for weeks, sometimes months. It’s the migration dry runs that have sat on the roadmap forever, the system incident that triggers a war room, a technical review with execs who don’t have time for second takes. You might architect a new integration or have to communicate crisis details to a room full of stakeholders—each of these is rare, but when they hit, everyone expects you to be calm and capable. The stakes spike, and suddenly all the quiet prep or missing context matters in a way nothing else has before.

Here’s why reps stay so rare. There’s a natural aversion to “practicing” with real customer data, live infrastructure, or tense teams. Most organizations only let you drive once the heat is real, so every run feels risky. Back when I was starting out, I wanted more “dry runs,” but nobody wanted to risk a mistake just for practice. You probably see the same thing—opportunity gets filtered through caution, and by the time you’re up, the pressure is already cranked.

But you can sidestep that scarcity. Ride along as a shadow, set up realistic simulations, rehearse with blunt feedback. You don’t have to wait for permission or for the perfect opening. You can manufacture the reps that build readiness, before the big moment ever hits.

How to Practice High-Stakes Engineering: A Practical Plan for Building Real Reps—Not Just Waiting

Let’s talk mechanics. Those skills aren’t built by accident. Shadowing, simulation, and rehearsal—these are the three core moves that turn rare moments into repeatable, learnable experiences. They interlock because each targets a different gap. Shadowing gets you context. Simulation pushes you under pressure. Rehearsal trains your delivery. The trick isn’t to just go through the motions, but to treat every practice run as a chance to close a specific skill gap. That’s the heart of deliberate reps. Each repetition is structured so you’re not just accumulating time, but actually getting better. It’s not about comfort. It’s about improvement, every single loop.

Start with shadowing. If there’s an incident you’re likely to own next quarter, or a migration coming up, or even a recurring exec review, ask to ride shotgun. Set up a concrete shadowing rotation—real calendar invites, not vague “let me know.” At the start, define exactly what you’ll watch for.

How decisions get made in chaos. What gets escalated. How context is translated for non-engineers. Talk to whoever’s running point and clarify what you’re allowed to contribute (sometimes you just observe; sometimes you get to suggest next steps in the debrief). This is awkward at first—I still remember asking to listen in on incident calls and doubting if I was just getting in the way. But honestly, anything to get reps before the real thing is fair game. Once you have a couple of these under your belt, roles and objectives become clearer, the stakes feel less mysterious, and you get glimpses of the hidden work behind polished delivery.

Next, simulate engineering incidents. This isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s your safe zone for getting things wrong without blowing anything up. Take the actual event you’re prepping for—say, a migration or a model rollout—and design drills that mirror the messiest parts. Inject fake failures. Set timers to create real urgency. Withhold some info so you learn to operate under uncertainty. Operators lean on fault injection simulators to build real resilience, cataloging failure scenarios without risking the live environment. That’s the logic. Make low-stakes practice feel like high-stakes reality.

Now, rehearse high-stakes engineering—this is where you lay your cards on the table. Don’t just recite notes in your head. Speak the words out loud, run the drill exactly as you’ll do it for real, and record yourself. Pull in a peer or a coach and ask for the kind of feedback that stings a bit, because it’ll sting less than botching the big moment. It feels awkward—listening back to your own voice, catching filler words or lost threads. But practicing in a realistic setting—like VR rehearsal—builds lasting confidence and readiness that carry into stressful real events. The payoff comes when the actual event arrives and your delivery feels like second nature instead of a coin toss.

Don’t skip the feedback loop. Every run—shadowed, simulated, or rehearsed—should end with review. Use a formal checklist or an AI tool to surface what you missed or where you froze. Write down your decisions and their outcomes, capturing both the good moves and the avoidable slips. That’s how you tighten your cycle and make the next rep count more than the last. You’ll be surprised what surfaces: bias, blind spots, or just patterns you never noticed while in the thick of it.

The last piece? Operationalize it. Block time to practice skills, and set a steady cadence before the stakes get high. Don’t wait for the calendar invite for the “real thing.” The real thing starts with reps you make happen yourself.

Facing Doubts: Why Manufactured Reps Actually Work

Let’s admit it. Carving out time for extra reps feels expensive. Who hasn’t wondered whether a simulation can ever truly match the chaos of a real incident, or if you’ll even get a chance to shadow the high-stakes stuff before you’re shoved into it? These are legit concerns. But skipping practice isn’t safe either. It’s betting that luck and credentials will cover the gap. I see this as risk management, not comfort. Being deliberate about reps is how you avoid being “the deer in headlights” when pressure spikes. And honestly, you’re already sweating that risk—the question is whether you want a buffer or decide to keep rolling the dice.

If you’re worried you can’t fit formal drills into your week, try micro-reps right where you are. Use standups to practice incident reports, toss surprise scenarios into retros, or run engineering tabletop exercises—like a five-minute “what if” at the end of a review. If you want your simulation to feel messier, add randomness—have someone interrupt you, scramble details, or reorder priorities mid-flow. For shadowing high-stakes moments, get creative: volunteer to take notes during migrations, offer to run status calls, or ask to sit in on an exec review even if you’re not “the lead.” You don’t have to wait for someone to hand you the wheel to start learning how to drive.

The payoff is clear. You invest small upfront, but what you get is a huge drop in real-world risk, a smoother response when everything gets noisy, and—maybe most valuable—trust that arrives faster when the big moment finally hits. That buffer isn’t just for you. It’s what stabilizes whole teams when the heat is on.

A Simple Blueprint for Deliberate Reps

Pick your moment. What’s the high-stakes event looming on your calendar, or the one you can’t avoid forever? Figure out exactly which skills or moves you want to sharpen for it. Schedule a shadowing slot. Block off time for a simulation. Set up one or two short rehearsals—each with a feedback loop at the end. Write it down, make it real. Don’t let this be another “should.” Set dates, message your peer, lock it in.

Roles look different, but the core method holds. SREs run incident response drills—pairing up to hand over and diagnose mock outages until transitions are smooth. ML engineers walk through model rollouts with simulated data, triggering edge-case failures before a real pipeline ever runs. Managers script and practice executive reviews as dry runs, gathering peers to ask the tough questions executives might lob back. No one’s guessing; the reps cement confidence where the live stakes are highest.

You can start this today. Find a peer right now—shoot them a Slack saying you want to shadow their next incident, or ask if they’ll play the exec during your review dry run. Don’t build a whole program, just block an hour and try one round. That single rep is the only way you get real leverage from all the waiting and prep.

Here’s the bar to hold yourself to. You don’t rise to the occasion. You fall to the level of your preparation. That’s the logic. The freedom is knowing anyone can set that floor higher—starting now.

There are still moments where I prep and rehearse, do the shadowing, run the simulation, and when the real thing hits, my hands go cold anyway. Not sure that ever fully goes away. Maybe it’s just what comes with actually caring about the outcome.