Wes Kao: evaluation

Transcript context

…You mentioned your manager and that's a really good segue to our next topic, which is around managing up. If a feature ships, but no one knows about it, did it really ship? Keeping customers and internal teams like sales, support and marketing in the loop on what's changing across your product is surprisingly hard. First you have to dig through tickets and pull requests just to see what's been done. Then you have to figure out what's relevant to each person, craft updates, and then share them across all of your channels. Multiply this by the number of things that ship every week and that's basically a full-time job just to keep everyone updated on what's changing. That's why high velocity product teams like Monte Carlo, Armory and PopSQL use Makelog. Makelog makes it easy to see what's happening across tools like Jira, Linear, Asana, and GitHub, and then to write bite-sized updates, which you can immediately share with your audience wherever they are, including within your app, on Slack, over email, and even on Twitter. No more long boring blog style change log posts that slow you down, just quick and easy updates that keep your users informed and happy. Try, Makelog for free today. Just visit, makelog.com/lenny to get started. I think your most popular tweet you've ever tweeted is around the skill of managing up. And funny enough, I had a thread on managing up years ago and it's also my most popular tweet thread ever. So there's a lot of interest in this topic. And so I want to ask you why is managing up important? Why are people not doing it well and how do you manage up effectively? Great questions. I think that most people assume that their boss has to manage them and they feel a little bit resentful that, why should I manage my boss? They're getting paid more. They are my manager. They have more responsibility. And you can continue to think that way and your career might be fine, but if you embrace that, if you manage your boss, they're going to appreciate you much more, you're going to get more opportunities, you're going to have more trust with them, there's all these great things that happen when you decide to manage up. And I think more people are realizing that, hey, as an individual contributor, or even as a manager, we all have bosses. So even as someone who leads people, you still need to manage up. There's no point in seniority where, as you climb the career ladder, that it just doesn't matter anymore. And I think some people think that senior people don't need to manage up like, oh, once I'm a director of VP, I don't need to manage up anymore, it's only something I need to do when I'm a coordinator or an associate PM or something. But ironically, the most senior people are best at managing up. This is why they got promoted in the first place because they were great at managing up to their bosses to understand what was worrying their bosses, what was keeping them up at night so that they could take that off their plate. They're great at keeping their bosses in the loop on what's happening so their bosses, aren't constantly having to ask and pepper them with questions every day on, hey, how's this going? Or what's the status of this? Or do we take care of this thing? They're proactive in communicating so their boss knows that certain things are taken care of. And so there's so many benefits that you can reap when you choose to manage up. How do you suggest folks do it? I actually have a tip, but is there something you want to share in that?…

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