Managing Up with Jan Chong #43

Jan Chong, VP of Engineering @ Tally shares strategies to manage and navigate relationships with your leadership team, direct reports and peers. We cover the fundamentals of managing up, why you need to align with your peers first when you join a new team, plus ways to communicate your ideas and the priorities of engineering more effectively with your non-technical colleagues.

"Organizations are made up of humans that are making decisions based on the data they have. If you don't think about how that data is being seen and understood, then you're going to have a really hard time getting the outcomes or driving the goals that you want to achieve..."
 

ABOUT JAN CHONG

Jan Chong is Vice President of Engineering at Tally, a financial automation company helping people navigate the complex world of consumer finance to save money, pay down their debt and reach their goals sooner. She leads and oversees the company’s client engineering, infrastructure security and technical operations teams. Before joining Tally, Jan was a long-time executive at Twitter where she played a critical role in launching and scaling its core mobile and web products, overseeing a team of more than 300 people in Twitter’s consumer engineering organization. Prior to that, Jan ran client and server development at OnLive, a cloud gaming platform. She received multiple degrees from Stanford University, including her Ph.D in management science and engineering, and M.S. and B.S in computer science.

SHOW NOTES

• What is Managing Up (3:52)
• What to do when your manager has different expectations and perception of your performance (6:19)
• The fundamentals of managing up (8:42)
• Making the world of management visible (10:39)
• The three categories of “managing up” and why you should align with your peers first (15:07)
• Who you need to “mind-meld” with & how to replicate it remotely (22:29)
• How to align & “mind-meld” with your peer leaders (27:22)
• Managing up at different levels of seniority (33:28)
• What you need to do to “manage up” effectively (39:30)
• Unexpected differences of working with non-technical colleagues & Jan’s metaphors to explain engineering (43:23)
• Takeaways (51:05)

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