I worked at 3 different companies and across many different teams. May be it is my fortune but I have not come across a single useful TPM. Some of the teams had no TPM and we were fine. On one other team, the SDM hired a TPM and there was surge in meeting time. e.g. 3 hr sprint planning for a 2 week sprint. Exhausting! What do you all think? TC: 280k
What is TPM? Team Project Manager? Target Potato Money? Tentative Pterodactyl Morsels?
Technical Program Manager
Every TPM i ever worked with has been helpful. More specifically when dealing with non-senior engineers or engineers that don’t see the product from a high level. Helps to ensure all the dependencies on different cross functional teams are on track. I’ve been lucky 😅
Makes my work easier as a lead… let me focus on the dev work
Yes, fairly useful for cross-team cross-functional projects.
A good TPM can be useful but those are rare. I agree that most TPMs end up scheduling way too many meetings and wasting a lot of time in the name of “process.”
Good TPMs are hard to find but absolutely critical to successful endeavors. I have had the pleasure to work with skilled ones and it make a big difference to the effectiveness of a team. Coordination and representation of product vision throughout avoids disaster, missed dates, code rework etc. classic issues like one team using imperial the other metric and making mistakes. A good tpm can boost morale by bring it all together.
At Amazon they’re pretty useless. SDMs and PM-Ts can do the same if not better.
Good TPMs are rare.
I’m a TPM and google is still paying me. Therefore I’m useful or my engineering partners are too lazy to get me fired.
Many teams don’t need or want a TPM but for cross functional work “programs” (or at dysfunctional orgs) they are critical. Often they are not optimizing for a local maximum and drive larger initiatives that lack clear ownership. An EM may be incentivized to optimize solely for their team to the detriment of the larger org. Management often see gaps that require a TPM but truthfully better addressed by getting their team incentives right. The don’t align incentives so they often get TPM to drive alignment.
Not yet either