Managing Your Manager

Managing Research Software Projects

Greg Wilson

2026

Learning Objectives

  • Describe three practices for managing your manager.

Working With the People Above You

  • Managing your manager makes the relationship more productive for both of you.
  • Your manager controls resources and priorities.
  • You know feasibility and cost.
    • Provide that information clearly and early.

Translate Effort into Impact

  • “That would take three weeks” rarely has an impact.
  • Instead, Say what the team cannot do if they do that (i.e., opportunity cost).
    • Managers compare impacts, not estimate hours.
  • Anchor trade-offs to grants, tenure, publications, and reputation.

Say No by Offering Alternatives

  • “I can’t do that” forces the manager to disagree or back down.
  • Offer a trade-off: “I can do that if we defer item 12.”
  • Most managers make the trade-off sensibly when it is presented as such.
  • Again, anchor trade-offs to the grants and publications.

Give Written Updates

  • Send a brief weekly email before they ask.
    • This is your progress/plans/problems report.
  • It prevents ad hoc check-ins and creates a record.
  • Keep track of current commitments and time estimates.

Translate a Technical Decision (10 min)

Think of a technical decision your project has made or needs to make, such as refactoring a module or switching a dependency.

  1. Write a two-paragraph explanation for your supervisor that describes the decision in terms of risk, reliability, and impact rather than technical detail.

  2. Prompt an LLM to write a similar explanation. Where is it the same? Where does it differ? Where is it just plain wrong?

The Alternative Offer (10 min)

  1. Work in pairs. One person plays a manager who has just asked for something unreasonable (use a real example from your own work, or use Jess’s situation). The other person practices saying no by offering an alternative. You cannot say “that’s not possible” or “we don’t have time”; you must frame your response as, “I can do [X] if we [trade-off].”

  2. Repeat the exercise using an LLM as your manager. What prompt did you give it? Was its output useful for helping you practice for a real conversation?

Choosing a Course Correction (15 min)

Your project is four weeks from its deadline and you have just realized you are six weeks behind. Three options are on the table:

  1. Slip the deadline by two weeks and ask your funder for an extension.
  2. Cut two half-finished features and ship the remaining ones complete.
  3. Keep the deadline, ship what you have, and send users a patch in six weeks.

Write two or three sentences for each option describing what it will cost the team, what it will cost the users or stakeholders, and what it will signal to your manager about how you handle pressure. Compare your answers to a partner’s. Did you rank the options the same way? If not, what assumptions led you to different conclusions?