Managing Up: Improve Your Relationship with Your Manager

As an EM you are responsible for building an effective team. Your growth opportunities and those for your team depend on how your engineering leadership sees the team and its work. You have a role to play in telling the team's story, setting expectations, raising issues, and being accountable for results.

In today's tech environment where many companies are reducing team sizes through layoffs, it's even more critical to help your engineering leadership see the value the team is providing. And ICs will be more likely to stay if they feel their manager is successful at communicating the team's accomplishments, risks, and failures.

We rightly focus new EMs on how to work with their teams: 1:1s, facilitation, dev process. We've spent relatively less time teaching EMs how to work across and "up" in the org.