Hot take: Technical Program Managers
If you’re a technical program manager and your weekly routines revolve around sprint planning, running stand up, creating confluence pages, and updating Jira… sorry to say, but you’re not a technical program manager. Am I wrong? #tech #tpm #technicalprogrammanager
Sounds like an engineer who thinks the inmates can run the mad house. Sometimes a TPM will do those things in orgs where they don't have project managers (poor bastards). But you do what you gotta to keep the ship running
Not disagreeing - keeping things running is important, but it’s also good to delegate and empower the team to do these things so the TPM can focus on other things.
Everything you describe mounts up to setting upwards expectation and holding people accountable, which are very hard to do. You need to be technical to know what questions to ask and not just take any timeline engineers give you. Running a good standup isn’t just going down the line calling people’s names and ending the call.
Totally agree with you. You also can’t just make your own timelines up without consulting engineering. Even if you’re using data to forecast you still need to have a conversation. There’s more to the role than people realize. Sadly when their former position was “scrum master” I guess this is what happens.
So this guy is more like a scrum master?
Precisely.