Technical Program Manager (TPM) resources

Question

A coworker of mine is transitioning to a TPM role at my company. This is a new role at my org, and my coworker has never worked as a TPM before and the manager who suggested that he transition to the TPM role has left the company.

I have worked with TPMs in the past so I'm a little familiar with the TPM role at big tech, and so I volunteered to work with him on transitioning to the role. I figured this would be a good way to improve collaboration with my coworkers and improve cross team collaboration.

Are there any resources or deep dives into the TPM role, how to effectively work as a TPM, and how to onboard a TPM?

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

I browsed through the resources here, and it seems okay: https://www.mariogerard.com/a-definitive-repository-of-everything-tpm/

I have worked with a lot of TPMs in the past, both good and bad. My advice to be an effective TPM is to strive to add value to engineers and let them do their thing. When it comes to the role TPMs play, it's actually quite open-ended. From my understanding, TPMs make the engineering team execution as smooth as possible without concretely touching the code.

Good TPMs:

Talk to the engineers, figure out their problems, and produce solutions
Get out of the engineers' way when they have a clear path ahead
Proactively spot non-technical issues (lack of XFN alignment, missed compliance risk) and address them
Act as "communication glue" for the team and resolve misalignments across all angles, protecting the focus of the engineers

Bad TPMs:

Bog down engineers with useless processes, often times related to "agile" development (make them go through endless sprint meetings, make them do story points, etc)
Don't talk to engineers and instead try to force them to follow their top-down project management strategy
Hound engineers constantly to see if they're making deadlines
Never actually solves any problems: Just points them out, puts engineers on them, and cracks the whip until they're done

I recommend checking this out as well: [Taro Top 10] Project Management

Technical Program Manager (TPM) resources

Discussion