Managing Up; Fair Performance Reviews; Types of Teams; Invisible Business Impact
Issue #56 Bytes
🌱 Dive into Learning-Rich Sundays with groCTO ⤵️
Managing Up: The Most Undervalued Skill
Ever wonder why some engineers get ahead while others struggle, even with brilliant ideas? It's not just about what you do, but how you "manage up." This eye-opening article by Lena Reinhard cuts through the usual useless advice to reveal why actively shaping your relationship with your boss is the most overlooked superpower in your career toolkit.
You'll discover how to stop your boss from micromanaging, ensure your work gets the recognition it deserves, and ultimately, lighten your own workload—all by mastering a few key communication habits.
If you're ready to transform how your contributions are perceived and propel your career forward, this guide is your essential read.👇
Article of the Week ⭐
The New Manager's Dilemma: How to Run Fair Performance Reviews with No Budget and Little Context
The Situation
You’re new in the role. Barely settled in, and the calendar drops a bomb: it’s performance review season. You don’t know your team well, and your compensation budget is tight. Welcome to your first real leadership test.
It’s a scenario many first-time or transitioning engineering managers face. Sergio frames it as both a crisis and an opportunity: either fumble through and lose credibility, or handle it with intention and emerge with trust.
(Image credits Sergio Visinoni)
🧱 Step-by-Step Breakdown
1. Lead with Radical Transparency
You’re not fooling anyone. Acknowledge upfront that you’re new and working with limited context. Sergio recommends using this to your advantage to disarm defensiveness and set clear expectations.
Admit knowledge gaps: “I haven’t been here long enough to make fully informed assessments.”
Set a conservative frame: “I’d rather level up later than risk giving you an inflated rating now.”
Commit to next time: “I will ensure the next cycle is deeper, fairer, and more informed.”
Rather than pleasing everyone you lead with integrity and consistency. Trust compounds when you show your team how you think and why.
2. Compensate for Context Gaps
Not knowing people doesn’t mean you get to guess. You owe it to the team to reconstruct a fuller picture. Use multiple sources:
Self-evaluations: Ask team members to reflect on their impact, challenges, and growth. Use this to gauge self-awareness and internal alignment.
Peer feedback: Reach out to colleagues who’ve worked with them. Use simple, structured questions.
Previous managers: If they’re around, leverage their institutional memory—but make your own judgment call.
The goal is to demonstrate fairness, curiosity, and a real effort to evaluate, not assume or guess from the hip when you could be gathering data.
3. Budget and Fairness
How to allocate a tight comp budget in a way that feels fair? Everyone has expectations that you cannot fulfill in one round, maybe ever.
Drive with a principle-led approach:
Prioritize underpaid individuals first, assuming they’re performing at level. Unaddressed inequity outside of their salary band becomes your liability after this round.
Be upfront about the consequences: “Focusing here limits my flexibility elsewhere.”
Avoid flattening the budget (e.g., same raise for everyone), which looks like laziness or fear of making hard calls.
The tradeoffs should be explained without scrutiny or blame-seeking.
For CTOs and Directors
If you’re coaching new managers, this is the kind of guidance they rarely get. Too often, new leaders are thrown into performance cycles with zero tooling and end up improvising badly. Use this as a model to help them think in systems: fairness, information gathering, principle-based tradeoffs, and long-term trust.
You can’t fix context instantly, but you can help them lead with credibility from day one.
Other highlights 👇
Three Team Vibes
You can often diagnose a team’s health by simply asking how things are going. John Cutler outlines three recurring team “vibes” that reveal underlying coordination, clarity, and cohesion (or lack thereof). He frames them as familiar patterns every leader should learn to recognize.
Team 1: Aligned, Outcome-Driven
High clarity. A small number of shared goals, clear focus, some reactive space, and a grasp of upcoming challenges. The team is proactive, has strategic line of sight, and is making progress with momentum and discipline.
Team 2: Parallel Tracks, Local Progress
Everyone is working hard—but in isolation. Progress is being made, but it feels disjointed. Collaboration is limited. This is often seen in environments that over-index on individual initiative without shared coordination or common priorities.
Team 3: Strategically Unsettled, Dependency-Tangled
The team is stuck in ambiguity, blocked by external dependencies, and unsure what actually matters. Communication is reactive. There's a fog of uncertainty around ownership, goals, and direction. Common symptoms: political churn, roadmap confusion, and leadership transition.
These modes are structural and cultural, each with their own performance trade offs. You can cycle between them over time, but unmanaged drift into Team 2 or Team 3 mode is corrosive. As a leader your leverage is in recognizing team operating patterns early enough to intervene meaningfully.
"Explain the Business Impact!” (And Other Useless Advice)
Engineering leaders are routinely asked to justify critical, high-risk work like refactoring legacy systems or breaking up monoliths as if it were a product launch. But most of that advice doesn’t work. Christine Miao shows why traditional ROI-based framing fails, and what to do instead.
Why Tech Debt Projects Stall
There’s always “The Thing”. That one architectural liability dragging the team. A rewrite. A refactor. mIcRoSeRViCes. AI. Everyone knows it, and still… it doesn’t get addressed. Why?
Because leaders are told to rationalize the work like a product investment:
Show business impact
Prove ROI
Hit fast milestones
This framing pushes engineering into sabotage, timelines get sanded down. And if the project is approved, the team is set up to fail or worse: it’s shelved entirely.
This keeps the pressure high without any tangible benefit, creating existential risks that remain invisible until it’s too late.
Engineering ≠ Special, But It Is Invisible
The issue isn’t that engineering is uniquely complex it’s that the rest of the org can’t see what engineering sees. Sales doesn’t write business cases to update pitch decks. Legal doesn’t justify contract compliance with ROI. But engineering? Asked to quantify everything abstract and long-term before it even starts.
When you describe engineering only in story points and cycle time, you strip away the substance of the work.
Technical Accounting: A Better Lens
Christine introduces technical accounting as a pragmatic alternative. It visualizes engineering’s ability to maintain and evolve systems using three lenses:
Resourcing: Who actually understands the system, and where coverage is thin
Architecture: Where system complexity adds drag
Maintenance: What’s required to keep things alive (beyond shipping new features)
One example: mapping ICs across subsystems shows where a team is dangerously dependent on a single person. No pitch deck needed, just clear visibility.
The challenge is surfacing the work. If you can make the invisible visible, the whole org can participate. Leaders collaborate early and act decisively instead of infighting for resources.
Find Yourself 🌻
That’s it for Today!
Whether you’re innovating on new projects, staying ahead of tech trends, or taking a strategic pause to recharge, may your day be as impactful and inspiring as your leadership.
See you next week(end), Ciao 👋
Credits 🙏
Curators - Diligently curated by our community members Denis & Kovid
Featured Authors -
, , & Lena ReinhardSponsors - This newsletter is sponsored by Typo AI - Ship reliable software faster.
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