Managing Up
by Mary Abbajay
A practical field guide to your boss's wiring — useful, if a little thin past the taxonomy.
- Status
- Read · April 2022
- Bought
- April 19, 2022
- For
- Engineers moving into their first lead or manager role · ICs stuck under a boss they can't read · Anyone whose review hinges on a relationship, not just output
Where it earned its place
The one-paragraph verdict
The core move is good and Abbajay states it plainly: the relationship with your boss is yours to manage, and waiting for them to change is a slow way to lose. The boss-archetype taxonomy and the “50 points” reference chapter are the parts I actually came back to — they give you language for a dynamic you’d otherwise just complain about. Where it wears thin is the back half: the advice gets generic, the archetypes stop mapping cleanly to real people, and a lot of it lands as “communicate more, assume good intent.” It’s a short read that still feels padded. Treat it as a checklist of moves, not a theory.
Who should read it
Read it if you’re an IC who keeps friction-with-the-boss off your own ledger, or a new lead realizing your job is now half relationship management. Skip it if you already do stakeholder work deliberately — you’ll find the framing obvious and the prose slow.
Where it earned its place
The “diagnose, then adapt” stance is exactly what I leaned on in building an engineering–product partnership: I stopped treating the PM’s priorities as noise and started reading them as a system to work with. That’s this book’s one durable idea, applied sideways.
Skip it if…
You want depth, data, or anything past archetypes-and-tactics. This is a practical primer, not a serious treatment of power and managing up.
[Managing Up on Goodreads]