managing-up

Managing Up is a coaching and communication skill that helps leaders and individual contributors transform their relationship with managers and founders from a simple reporting line into a high-trust strategic partnership. It addresses the common problem that talented people often communicate reactively, avoid necessary disagreements, or fail to make their team's work visible, which limits their autonomy and access to resources. The skill draws on curated insights from 21 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

The workflow guides the user through four steps: auditing their current communication style, structuring an operating cadence with weekly update templates that surface blockers before a manager asks, scripting difficult conversations using business-centered framing, and mapping a trust-building path via the Meat and Potatoes framework. It packages named frameworks such as The Magic Loop, a Three-Step Process for Saying No, the Alignment-Confidence Matrix, and Five Tactics for Managing Up. Core principles reframe self-promotion as educating leadership, replace adversarial pushback with a business-success mindset, and prioritize open dialogue over being right, each grounded in direct quotes from practitioners like Deb Liu, Jason Shah, and Kenneth Berger. Reference files provide the full guest insights and artifact details.

The target users are product managers, engineering and design leads, senior ICs, and executives who want to build alignment upward. Use cases include preparing weekly updates, handling disagreement with a manager or founder, asking for resources, and diagnosing common mistakes such as reacting with an immediate no or only communicating when something is wrong.