What is a Technical Program Manager? 🗺️
A primer about this crucial but often misunderstood role.
A few weeks ago I had a good chat with a friend of mine, who has a technical leadership role at a mid-size company (~50 engineers).
He told me they finally managed to create cross-functional teams that are fairly independent, and that he is happy with how fast they are able to ship new things. However, he also told me he is struggling with a couple of projects that — necessarily — span the work of many of such teams.
Coordination is tricky and so is resource allocation, because ownership is somewhat distributed and each problem goes back and forth like a hot potato.
I asked him if they ever thought of introducing Technical Program Managers to run such projects. He answered that he wasn’t sure, because he wasn’t familiar with the role and how it would fit the organization.
This was an honest confession, and it struck a chord with me. The TPM role is often misunderstood, I believe for two main reasons:
⏱️ Timing — as with many roles that aren’t useful until your team reaches a certain size, it is tricky to figure out when it is the right time to add one.
🔬 Scope — TPMs sit in your product / engineering org while having no direct authority or ownership of engineering or product teams or components. Many people are baffled at this.
So how does Technical Program Management work? To shed light onto this crucial role, I asked for help from my friend Aadil Maan, who graciously co-authored this piece.
Aadil has a tremendous experience having led programs at companies like Humane, Apple, Nike, and Google. He is also a fantastic writer — he is the author of the Building Romes newsletter, where every week he explains and demystifies specific aspects of the TPM role. You should check it out!
So, this article wants to be a primer on Technical Program Management where we cover the why, the what, and the how.
Today we will talk about:
📖 What is a TPM — and how they differ from other managers.
🤹♀️ Skills of a good TPM — let’s talk project management, tech knowledge, and communication.
🔍 Signs you may need a TPM — to figure out when it is the right time to add one.
💼 How to break into a TPM role — career advice for people interested in the role.
Let’s dive in!
📖 What is a TPM
A typical Product team may consist of a Product Manager, Engineering Lead, Design Lead, and some engineers.
Often times that is enough, but for complex projects where you have multiple teams working together, a Technical Program Manager may step in to orchestrate the collaboration across the various domains.
To put it in another way:
Product Managers focus on the what and why.
TPMs help Engineering Leads with the how and when.
A TPM is the nervous system ensuring product and engineering continues to stay aligned on the what, why, how and when.
At large companies, where it becomes necessary for Product Managers to focus on the strategic aspect of their role, a TPM is brought in like a tactician to help execute on the grand strategy. So, the TPM enters the stage to develop an end-to-end execution plan on how to ship a solution to a technical problem.
Such problems are of varying complexity, usually ambiguous in definition, and need to be delivered in collaboration with engineering, product, design, and marketing within a certain time & budget.
But how do TPMs do that? 👇
🤹 Skills of a good TPM
A Technical Program Manager needs three core competencies:
Project management
Technical knowledge
Soft skills
Let’s see all three:
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