With respect to A New Kind of Program Manager by Mario Gerard
By Dan Pham
Having worked in Silicon Valley, as both a program manager and technical program manager, I have to say that reading Gerard’s article about Technical Program Management was exciting, and I wanted to spread the gospel.
Sidenote: What kind of nerd gets excited reading articles about Technical Program Management?… Answer: 👉 This one! This nerd! 👈
In praise of Gerard, there’s are not many people talking about program management in general, and that’s probably because program managers tend to be “quietly get things done” sorta people. However, with the success of companies, like Apple, Amazon, and Google, who employ thousands of TPMs in the bay area, one thing is clear: Technical Program Management is here to stay.
What is a Technical Program Manager?
Technical Program Managers (TPMs) are a new class of Program Manager that’s become more popular at technology companies in the last 5 years or so. In Gerard’s words, “The role is not a program manager in the traditional sense. [TPMs replace] the typical project or program manager job with a marriage of two distinct responsibilities, software architect and program manager. The reason for the evolution and growth of this role is simple: Project and program managers are more effective when they thoroughly understand and can communicate effectively about the underlying technology they are responsible for building.”
Well said! Honestly, TPM is such a new role that not all Technical Program Managers might be brave enough to state it, or even do much self-reflection about what it means to be one :) While TPMs are not replacements for Project Managers, Engineers, or Technical Architects, the nature of product and software development has evolved and requires more cross-functional collaboration and technical leadership than ever.
Project and program managers are more effective when they thoroughly understand and can communicate effectively about the underlying technology they are responsible for building.
Who is hiring TPMs?
Because TPMs can increase the quality of product development, dedicated TPMs are becoming part of many product development and technical operations teams, including teams at Lyft, Twitter, Stripe, Slack, Google, Amazon, Apple, Dropbox, and even “cash-strapped” start-ups like Ripple, Forward, Plaid, Cruise Automation, and more…
What do TPMs do?
I’ve seen many flavors of TPMs, but the most common role TPMs are tasked with is the buildout of complex software products/features or system integrations. At Google and other large companies, I remember that their internal infrastructure almost always lived in an ecosystem of systems, each with complex requirements that can’t be accomplished without different teams working together to deliver common goals. TPMs play a critical role as the glue between teams, ensuring teams understand each other’s requirements, software dependencies, and organizational decision making processes through both technical, and organizational soft-skills.
Example: “TPM in Action”
Take, for example, a tech company developing features for a unified communications app. The company likely would have more than 30 teams focusing on the various end-user use cases and communication interfaces, such as chat, email, text messaging, and video. Each team might have various responsibilities in building out the app, including user identity, security, setting up read states, uploading images/videos, deciding what country the data is stored, and sending push notifications to various clients (desktop, web, Android, iOS, etc.), and more. As you can see, even a brief look at the communications’ app’s use cases would require multiple teams to be involved in how new features are designed.
It’s in this complex interplay between teams that TPMs shine. In building out their parts of the project, even dedicated engineering teams must balance their context switching as changing focus from their work can come with a cost. Using TPMs can share the load by driving the connections between teams to ensure there’s alignment.
The devil is in the details: “Microservices” (and Platform Standards)
Gerard makes a good reiterative point when he talks about code complexity and microservices: “[In] the dawn of microservices — in which applications are built as a suite of modular services, each supporting a specific business goal — [product development] has added to the overhead of communication. For example, a mobile application that has several features, each having its microservice for users to sign in, search and process payments, raises the need for skilled communicators.” Well said, and I’d add that this includes not just modular services, but also platform-level standards like developing for Android/iPhone, the Google/iOS App Stores, Twitch/YouTube, etc. If you are building a product or service with technology as its backbone, you are likely to have many dependencies across teams, which means someone needs to be responsible for all the back and forth — the TPM.
As a Staff TPM at Slack, I work across several teams to drive programs that span multiple business units and products (including a huge ecosystem of third-party apps). Since Slack has a lot of large enterprise customers that rely on its service, the people managing its programs must have a solid base of project management skills as well as sharp technical acumen to effectively communicate and resolve issues. In today’s age of best in class Software as a Service (SaaS) pioneered by Salesforce and cloud computing by Google, high standards are required in all parts of the business, whether it’s security, privacy, reliability, interop, or customer delight.
The future: Medicine, Retail, and Other Industries
Gerard concludes his article about where TPM is going. I can’t think of a single company where technology won’t be a component of its core offering in the future. While I don’t think it’s quite the sudden life or death battle that the media makes it out to be, I do believe that new ways of working and building solutions are necessary for companies to stay relevant in the service of their customers. As such, the demand for TPMs will rise, and it will become a “cornerstone role in tech and non-tech organizations alike.”
