A “minimum viable manager” is a manager who has established a workable foundation in three practices: building trust, setting clear expectations, and giving feedback. Matt Gjertsen uses the term to describe the minimum foundation for three core responsibilities: helping people work together, helping them work on the right things, and helping them improve over time. It is a starting point for learning and iteration, not a universal management style or a complete job description.
Gjertsen explains the framework in the October 9, 2026, InfoQ interview “The Minimum Viable Manager: Building Trust, Feedback, and Alignment”. The model is especially useful for a first-time manager who needs a practical sequence of behaviors rather than a long catalog of leadership theories.
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The three responsibilities behind the framework
The phrase is easiest to understand when separated from the word “minimum.” It does not mean doing as little management as possible. It means making sure the fundamentals are present before adding more elaborate processes, ceremonies, or leadership techniques.
| Core responsibility | Foundation practice | What the practice enables |
|---|---|---|
| Help people work together | Build trust | People can rely on the manager’s capability, judgment, and relationship with them. |
| Help people work on the right things | Set clear expectations | The team understands priorities, what good work looks like, and how collaboration should happen. |
| Help people improve their work over time | Give feedback | Improvement becomes a normal, two-way process based on observable work and behavior. |
These practices reinforce one another. Expectations give feedback a shared reference point. Trust makes difficult feedback easier to hear and makes decisions easier to accept. Feedback reveals where expectations, skills, or working relationships need adjustment.
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1. Build trust so people can work together
Trust is the foundation for coordination. Without it, people may withhold concerns, second-guess decisions, or avoid asking for help. Gjertsen describes trust through three perceptions: confidence in a person’s skills, confidence in their decisions, and a sense of personal connection.
Show capability in the management role
A manager does not need to be the strongest individual contributor on the team. The relevant question is whether the manager can perform the management work: clarify priorities, make or facilitate decisions, remove obstacles, and handle difficult conversations. Demonstrate that capability by following through on commitments, explaining decisions clearly, and learning the operational details needed to support the team.
For a technical manager, this often requires a deliberate shift. You are no longer proving value mainly through your own code, analysis, or technical output. Your value is visible in whether the team can make progress, resolve dependencies, and understand what matters next.
Make sound decisions and explain them
Trust in judgment grows when decisions are consistent, timely, and understandable. State the decision, the factors that influenced it, and what would cause you to revisit it. When information is incomplete, say what is known, what is uncertain, and who owns the next check. A transparent decision that later changes is usually easier to accept than an unexplained decision that appears arbitrary.
Connect with people without assuming sameness
Personal connection does not require identical relationships with every direct report. Some people prefer frequent conversation; others prefer time to think and concise check-ins. Learn how each person prefers to communicate, what kind of support they find useful, and which boundaries they want respected. Connection is built through attention and reliability, not by forcing personal disclosure or copying one relationship style across the team.
Trust-building behaviors to practice
- Keep small commitments, such as sending the promised context or making the promised introduction.
- Give credit for work in public and discuss problems in an appropriate private setting.
- Ask what is blocking progress before prescribing a solution.
- Admit uncertainty or mistakes and describe the correction.
- Apply standards consistently while allowing for individual working preferences.
2. Set clear expectations so effort goes to the right work
Clear expectations align effort. They answer two separate questions: what the team should accomplish and how people are expected to work together while accomplishing it. If either part is missing, a team can be busy without being aligned.
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Clarify priorities
State the most important outcomes in plain language and identify what is lower priority. When several requests compete, explain the trade-off rather than presenting every request as urgent. A useful expectation names the outcome, the owner, the relevant time frame, and any constraints or dependencies. If priorities change, communicate the change and its reason promptly.
Define what successful work looks like
“Do your best” is not an actionable standard. Describe the result that will count as successful: the user or business problem addressed, the quality or reliability requirement, and the evidence that will show completion. The level of detail should match the work. A small task may need only a clear outcome; a complex project may need milestones, decision points, and ownership boundaries.
Make collaboration expectations explicit
Teams also need agreements about communication and coordination. Explain where decisions are recorded, when to raise a risk, how handoffs work, and which discussions require the whole team. These are working agreements, not personality tests. Invite the team to refine them when they create friction or no longer fit the work.
A practical expectation-setting sequence
- Name the outcome: describe the problem to solve or result to deliver.
- Rank the work: identify the current priority and what can wait.
- Define the standard: explain the quality, scope, or behavior required.
- Assign ownership: make responsibility and decision rights visible.
- Check understanding: ask team members to raise ambiguity, dependencies, or conflicting commitments.
- Revisit when conditions change: update the expectation instead of letting an outdated plan remain authoritative.
Expectations are also the reference point for feedback. A conversation about missed work is more useful when both people can look at the same agreed outcome rather than argue about an unstated standard.
3. Give feedback so work improves over time
Feedback is not limited to annual reviews or moments when something has gone wrong. In this framework, it is a normal, two-way practice that helps people reinforce effective behavior and change ineffective behavior.
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Learn to ask for feedback first
Managers should make it safe and specific for employees to comment on management. Ask about a recent situation rather than inviting a vague judgment. For example: “In yesterday’s planning discussion, what should I keep doing, and what should I change next time?” Listen without arguing, thank the person for the information, and follow up on what you will do with it. Asking repeatedly and acting on useful input demonstrates that feedback is not merely a downward exercise.
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Use reinforcing feedback
Reinforcing feedback identifies a behavior that helped and explains its effect. “You summarized the decision and recorded the owner before the meeting ended; that prevented the handoff from becoming ambiguous” is more useful than “Good job.” Specific reinforcement tells the person which behavior is worth repeating.
Use redirecting feedback
Redirecting feedback addresses behavior that needs to change while keeping the conversation focused on future improvement. Describe what was observable, explain the impact, and agree on a different action. Avoid presenting an assumed motive as fact. “The review comments arrived after the release window, so the team had no time to act on them. Please raise blocking concerns during the review or flag them immediately” is actionable. “You did not care about quality” is a judgment about intent and gives the person no clear next step.
Keep feedback two-way and timely
Give feedback close enough to the event that the details are clear, but choose a setting that allows a thoughtful conversation. Invite the other person’s account, check whether your description is accurate, and agree on what will happen next. Timely does not mean impulsive; it means the issue is addressed before it becomes a pattern or surprises someone in a formal review.
- Describe the specific behavior or result.
- Explain the effect on the work, team, or customer.
- Ask for the person’s perspective.
- Agree on the behavior to continue or change.
- Follow up when the situation recurs.
A usable sequence for a new manager
Gjertsen’s practices can be applied as a sequence, while remembering that the sequence is a practical synthesis rather than a tested prescription.
- Agree on priorities and working expectations. Make the current outcomes, standards, ownership, and collaboration rules visible.
- Invest in trust. Make reliable decisions, keep commitments, learn each person’s preferred way of connecting, and respect boundaries.
- Establish regular feedback. Use reinforcing and redirecting feedback, ask for feedback upward, and focus on observable behavior.
- Identify the biggest constraint. Decide whether the team’s present bottleneck is trust, decision-making, a skill gap, or another concrete issue.
- Focus and iterate. Improve the largest constraint before adding several new management methods at once, then reassess as the team and context change.
This order prevents a common mistake: introducing elaborate tracking or meeting systems before people understand the work, trust the decision process, or know how improvement conversations will happen.
What the framework does not claim
“Minimum viable manager” is Gjertsen’s practical framework, not a standardized job description or a universally validated management theory. The interview emphasizes that leadership depends on the manager, team, and organization. A small, experienced team may need different support from a new team working through unclear ownership or major technical risk.
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The framework also does not establish that using these three practices will produce a particular engagement, retention, productivity, or business result. The available source is an interview explaining the author’s model; it does not provide comparative outcome data or a controlled evaluation. Use the model as a foundation for observation and adjustment, not as a guarantee.
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Treating trust as friendliness alone
A pleasant relationship cannot substitute for sound judgment or reliable execution. If decisions are inconsistent or commitments are missed, add operational reliability to the relationship work.
Assuming everyone wants the same connection
More personal contact is not automatically better. Ask how a person prefers to communicate and support them without crossing stated boundaries.
Making priorities clear but standards vague
Knowing the goal is not enough if people do not know what acceptable quality, scope, or collaboration looks like. Define the evidence of success before work begins.
Saving feedback for formal reviews
Delayed feedback turns a correctable behavior into a surprise. Address observable issues in a timely conversation and reserve formal reviews for the broader record, not the first disclosure.
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Managers cannot reliably infer intent from an outcome. Describe what happened, its effect, and the change needed.
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Adding too many methods at once
New managers sometimes respond to uncertainty by adopting multiple frameworks, dashboards, and meeting rituals. Identify the current bottleneck and work on that constraint first so the team can tell whether a change helped.
How a technical individual contributor can make the transition
A technical background is useful, but technical expertise alone does not satisfy the manager’s three responsibilities. Start by replacing personal execution with clarity and enablement:
- In planning, ask which outcome matters most and what trade-off the team is making.
- In technical discussions, make the decision process and owner visible instead of automatically taking the decision yourself.
- When someone is blocked, remove the dependency or help them find the right decision-maker rather than silently doing the task for them.
- In one-to-one conversations, discuss progress, obstacles, expectations, and feedback—not only project status.
- When reviewing work, distinguish a technical disagreement from a failure to meet an agreed expectation.
The goal is not to stop using technical judgment. It is to use that judgment in service of team decisions, learning, and sustainable progress.
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Further reading and source limits
The framework comes from Matt Gjertsen’s interview with Shane Hastie on InfoQ, published October 9, 2026: The Minimum Viable Manager: Building Trust, Feedback, and Alignment. Gjertsen also authored Minimum Viable Manager; a Morawa catalog listing identifies a paperback edition with ISBN 9781774587270, although retailer inventory and pricing can change: Morawa listing.
For a first-time manager, the practical test is straightforward: do people know what matters, can they rely on your decisions and working relationship, and are they getting useful feedback early enough to improve? Where one answer is weak, that is the place to focus next.
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