TPM: A New Kind of Program Manager
Mario Gerard, PMP, is a principal technical program manager at Oracle in Seattle.
As more organizations seek to build the latest and greatest tech advances, many of them are seeking a new type of program manager: a technical program manager (TPM). Though this is a relatively recent role in the tech industry, TPMs have gained significant prominence over the last five years.
The role is not a program manager in the traditional sense. Instead of replacing the typical project or program manager job with either, it’s 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.
The TPM’s core responsibility is to lead the build-out of complex software products. Large tech companies now have disparate teams that need to enable each other so they can effectively deliver on their common goals. This means that the people leading these project teams must understand the underlying software they are building, and they must also be able to interact effectively with the many other teams across the organization. Technical know-how and expert communication skills are both necessary to articulate the inner workings and finer points of the software being developed.
TPM in Action
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Published at Mon, 21 May 2018 04:00:00 +0000
