An Opportunity to Re-Invent Technical Program Management
2025.24 - AI is unlocking something more than productivity and efficiency game; for the first time ever, we have an opportunity to truly and correctly frame the IMPACT OF TPMs.
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An Opportunity Unlike Anything
We’re standing at a once-in-a-decade moment for Technical Program Management. For the first time, Gen AI tools are giving TPMs the ability to truly automate the busywork, amplify their awareness, and return to their true purpose: creating clarity in complex systems. This is not just an efficiency play but it’s a redefinition of value. When AI can handle elementary aspects the TPMs will increasingly own the truly impactful activities.
This is the chance to re-invent TPM work from coordination to sensemaking.
Back to Fundamentals and Sense-Making
The true impact of TPMs has always been sense-making; what is sense making? It’s connecting the dots between teams, disciplines, and signals that don’t naturally speak the same language. In every large, cross-functional effort, there are the big visible milestones and then there are the quiet edges in between them, the gaps where things tend to fall apart. At Apple, we were taught that TPMs are the nervous system of product development; they maintain the project’s memory, understanding where every moving part sits at any moment and why its sits there and how it must move. AI can track every task, dependency, and conversation. But it still can’t decide what’s noise, what’s a red herring, or what can be safely ignored. That human judgment, knowing when to act, when to wait, and when to call out the shortcut, remains deeply human and often irrational.
With Gen AI, TPMs can finally spend less time collecting signals and more time interpreting them.
The Administration Can Be Automated
The ceremonies, artifacts, and processes that once consumed TPM bandwidth like meeting facilitation, note-taking, document drafting, can now be offloaded to AI. Your AI agent can summarize the standup, record key decisions, flag risks, and even maintain living dashboards. That doesn’t make the TPM obsolete rather it makes them available again. If you’re still manually writing project updates or taking notes line by line, you’re doing it wrong.
The future TPM focuses not on documentation but on direction which means shaping conversations, framing tradeoffs, and reinforcing principles that keep the team aligned.
The Convergence Toward the Center
Think of product development as a spectrum: strategy on one end, execution on the other. Historically, Product Managers sat closer to the strategy, TPMs closer to execution. But Gen AI is collapsing that distance. Tools like Vibe Coding bring PMs nearer to execution; AI agents bring TPMs nearer to strategy. TPMs can now use AI to run analytics, synthesize insights from unstructured data, craft program narratives, and even test “what-if” scenarios. We’re witnessing a convergence unlike anything before where TPMs evolve into strategic sense-makers who bridge technical execution and business intent.
The lines between Product and Program are blurring, but the TPM’s role in designing systems that work, both human and digital, remains irreplaceable. Is the future TPM a hybrid Product Manager + Technical Program Manager?
Differentiate Between Coordinator Roles and TPMs
For years, many organizations treated TPMs as glorified coordinators; running meetings, grooming backlogs, updating Jira boards is but a small part of our function. That version of the role is fading fast or I foresee fading first. AI copilots and agents will handle the administrative layer, and what’s left will expose the real differentiator: TPMs who can think in systems, navigate ambiguity, and drive alignment across messy, multi-dimensional programs.
Yes, there will be fewer TPM roles but they’ll carry far greater impact. This isn’t contraction; it’s concentration of a specialized function. It's a net positive.
Rise of the Generalist
With ChatGPT, Claude, and similar tools, knowledge itself is no longer a competitive edge; everyone has access to the same facts. The TPMs who thrive next will be generalists with a deep capacity for learning, connecting, and adapting. They’ll move fluidly across technical and organizational domains from infrastructure to UX, from AI models to security policies, leading horizontally and cross-functionally.
Their advantage won’t come simply from what they know, but from how they synthesize and acquire new knowledge and capabilities. The quick learner will win the day.
Laser Focus > Speed
TPMs of old pre-historic-pre-AI traded between focus and speed especially when running multiple programs. The true unlock with AI is not doing things faster but free up our cognitive budget to laser focus on the truly hairy and complex things, whether milestones, dependencies, blockers etc. Speed is not the true unlock but TPMs can go deeper and wider (depth and breadth) without sacrificing high-level visibility into the day to day tactical operations of the programs you manage.
If your objective with AI as TPM is do more, flip that thinking. AI should allow you to do less but more impactful work.
The New North Star
In this reinvented era, the TPM’s North Star becomes designing predictable systems where humans and AI collaborate seamlessly. They will be the architects of hybrid workflows where they must ensure data, tools, and people create a self-correcting loop of insight and action. The TPM of the future isn’t just managing projects but they’re designing the system of work itself.
Less ceremony, more conversation.
Less reporting, more reflection.
Less managing process, more shaping intelligence.
Final Words
The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes: AI doesn’t replace TPMs but it reveals them and their true value. It peels away the layers of ceremony, the noise of status reports, the illusion of busyness and exposes what was always at the heart of this role: judgment, empathy, and clarity in motion.
The future TPM isn’t buried in Jira tickets. They’re standing at the intersection of systems and people, translating complexity into comprehension, chaos into clarity.
They know when to trust the data and when to trust their gut.
They know when to push the team and when to protect its focus.
They know that progress isn’t just a measure of velocity, it’s the quality of alignment.
Gen AI will change how we work, but TPMs will determine why it matters.
We’re not just witnessing the evolution of a job title, we’re likely seeing the rebirth of a discipline. The best TPMs of this next era will not compete with AI; they will compose with it. They’ll design systems where agents, humans, and data all play their parts in harmony. They’ll move faster not because they automate more, but because they understand more deeply.
This is our moment; a once-in-a-decade opportunity to reinvent what it means to be a Technical Program Manager. To move from running programs to engineering intelligence. To step beyond the process and become the sense-makers that every AI-powered organization will need.
So the question is: when the busywork disappears, how will you transform yourself? what value will you bring to your role and team?
Until next time.
-Aadil