Managing Up

Latest episodes

• "What Am I Even Paid To Do?" — Ego, Identity, and the AI Reckoning

  May 7, 2026 · 1 hr 2 min

  Travis, Brandon, and Nick come back from a two-year absence to interrogate the question one of Travis's engineers asked him about using AI: this feels like cheating — what am I actually paid to do? What happens to an engineer's sense of…

• What If Meetings… Were Good, Actually?

  January 24, 2024 · 1 hr 2 min

  In this episode of the Managing Up Show, Brandon, Travis, and Nick talk about meetings. How did they get a bad reputation? How can they be better? And no, the answer is not to abolish meetings, but rather to put the effort into making them…

• Moving Past "Hero Culture"

  February 15, 2023 · 59 min

  Nick, Travis, and Brandon talk "hero culture" and how that affects teams. What are the drawbacks of encouraging hero culture? How do you draw the distinction between necessary heroism and chronic hero culture? What's the difference between…

• Actually Managing Up

  November 16, 2022 · 1 hr 2 min

  OK, fine, y'all win. We finally did the episode of "Managing Up" about managing up. In it, Nick, Travis, and Brandon talk about techniques for managing up, how they're similar to managing your own team members, and how it is sometimes very…

• How We've Changed the Way We Manage in the Pandemic, with Estella Gonzalez Madison

  June 13, 2022 · 1 hr 3 min

  The Managing Up Crew is joined by Estella Gonzalez Madison (@chicagoing) to discuss how they've changed the way they manage since the start of the pandemic 2+ years ago. They discuss tactical changes and how they've changed philosophically…

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