Your professor can fully understand your work, could have done it herself if she had the time, and can fully check your work for any flaws or limitations. Your

Your professor can fully understand your work, could have done it herself if she had the time, and can fully check your work for any flaws or limitations. Your non-technical manager cannot fully understand your work, do it herself or check it. If "Substantial contributions to the conception ... of the work" is enough to be a co-author, she should be a co-author. But that means that if Pointy-Haired-Boss tells Dilbert to "make the Skype call to Mars less laggy" and Dilbert invents FTL communication, PHB gets to be co-author of the paper (and resulting Nobel prize?). That seems too generous to PHB.