8. Two ways to manage up (borrowed from AirBnb and Stripe)
Half of career success is doing good work, the other half is making sure people know about it.[0]
One of the best ways to make sure people know about the work you’re doing it to “manage up”. This is how a subordinate interacts with their manager. Managing up implies that the subordinate is doing more work in the relationship than normal. You can stand out this way.
Here are two effective ways I’ve managed up:
1. Work in public
Working in public allows other people on the team to see what you’re doing and intervene if it’s not efficient. Just today I was going to do an external search for a software tool, only to realize that we have a tool for that already. You’d be surprised how frequently this kind of thing happens.
Tactically, working in public can look a few ways. It could be starting each day posting to an internal Slack channel what you are going to do that day. Then posting about what you did at the end of the day.
It can also look like an email sent to your manager once per week. My favorite template is the “State of Me” template from Lenny Rachitsky:
2. Be honest in meetings, especially 1:1 meetings
Often problems you face are psychological problems, even at work. Sure, there are other kinds of problems like if you’re making the right decisions or targeting the right customer persona. But often if you wrap up a day and it wasn’t productive, something psychological is holding you back.
I’ve found this to be true for myself, but I’m not the only one who agrees. Sam Gerstenzang, founder of Moxie and former Stripe product leader (among other things), wrote about it in a blog post he wrote a few years ago. The post was about what he learned about operating a business while at Stripe.
Here’s the part about psychological issues at work:
While managers should ask these questions, good subordinates should bring these topics up to their managers. Here are a few examples of things I’ve said to managers over the years that have helped unblock me:
“I’m hearing conflicting priorities from you and the CEO.”
“We’ve added a few new people recently and I don’t know how they fit in. It seems the problem has shifted from not having enough people to not having enough coordination.”
“I’m not as productive as I usually am and I’m not sure why.”
There are other ways to manage up, but these actions have been the most useful for me.
[0] This is true even at startups, although it looks different than at big companies. There’s a stereotype that if you want to get promoted at a large company you need to be disingenuous by trying to get certain people of influence to vouch for you. I can’t speak to this because I haven’t work very long at big large companies. Communicating your work matters just as much at startups, but for a different reason. It doesn’t necessarily help you get promoted faster (promotion isn’t the goal at startups anyway!). It does, however, help you win favor from other team members so that you can accomplish goals faster.