Manage Up

Franco Caramanico

22 Jun 2025

Frontline managers and senior engineers often ask how much visibility I need into their work.

There’s a simple but powerful way to manage up: say you’re going to do the thing, say you’re doing the thing, and say you’ve done the thing. It’s a lightweight loop that builds trust and lets you move fast — independently.

It creates alignment (you’re working on the right outcomes), invites correction (you’re doing it the right way), and gives closure (it’s done and you get credit). If your leaders need more detail, they’ll ask.

There’s no long-term without short-term

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Innovation

When a company survey shows that people don’t feel like they can innovate in their day-to-day work, the automatic response is: let’s run more hackathons. Hackathons are fun. Some good ideas come out of them. But they don’t build a culture of continuous innovation. In my experience,

The virtuous cycle of the passion

There’s a scene in the Oscar-winning Argentine film The secret in their eyes that I like a lot: “A guy can change anything. His face, his house, his family, his girlfriend, his religion, his God. But there’s one thing he can’t change. He can’t change his

Some random thoughts about AI on a Sunday evening

The hype around AI didn’t come overnight. It’s the result of decades of technological progress and converging trends. But in November 2022, OpenAI made it real for everyone. Most people in tech didn’t see it coming, even if they now want to tell a different story. Big

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There’s no long-term without short-term

Innovation

The virtuous cycle of the passion

Some random thoughts about AI on a Sunday evening