In Between Two Forces
2025.03 - TPM will deal with two major forces in their roles - Leaders and Managers. The effectiveness of these forces will dictate how a TPM must operate.
Summary: Technical Program Managers bridge the gap between leaders and managers, ensuring alignment and progress despite varying levels of effectiveness in strategy and execution.
Three common scenarios for TPMs:
Effective Leaders, Ineffective Managers: Strong vision but poor execution.
Ineffective Leaders, Effective Managers: Ambiguous strategy with competent execution.
Effective Leaders, Effective Managers: The ideal scenario, nah dream scenario.
Collaboration is key: Partnering with Product Managers is essential for navigating complexity and achieving outcomes.
TPMs thrive by balancing clarity, structure, and adaptability, turning challenges into opportunities and enabling teams to succeed.
In your career as a Technical Program Manager (TPM), you’ll inevitably find yourself at the crossroads of two distinct forces: leaders and managers.
These forces, with their unique strengths and weaknesses, shape the environment you work in and challenge your ability to navigate the complexities of strategy and execution.
Recognizing these dynamics is crucial for aligning teams, driving outcomes, and thriving in your role.
1. Effective Leaders and Ineffective Managers
Think: A bold strategy lost in weak execution.
The Situation: These are scenarios where leaders craft compelling strategies and roadmaps that inspire, but the execution falters. Delays become commonplace, estimations are wildly off, solutions lack scalability, and technical debt begins to accumulate.
Your Role as a TPM:
Cut through the noise by breaking deliverables into manageable chunks.
Be the bridge between high-level vision and on-the-ground reality.
Step in to align leadership's aspirations with the development team's capabilities, but tread carefully—you're not an engineering manager.
Balance proactive involvement with respect for established roles.
This is where you sharpen your ability to manage scope without compromising relationships, ensuring progress even in an imperfect system.
2. Ineffective Leaders and Effective Managers
Think: A scattered vision that tests even the best managers.
The Situation: Leadership struggles to provide clear strategies or goals, leaving managers to either make the best of chaos or abandon ship. Projects may deliver on time and on scope, yet fail to align with the broader company objectives, which remain murky.
Your Role as a TPM:
Anchor the teams by establishing a semblance of purpose, even in the absence of clear direction.
Collaborate with Product and Engineering Managers to define meaningful metrics and success criteria.
Use momentum as a tool—keep the wheels turning while continuously seeking clarity from leadership.
Favor visual communication, such as demos and show-and-tell sessions, to engage leadership and ground them in reality.
In these scenarios, TPMs bring structure to ambiguity, cultivating progress while helping leadership find its footing.
3. Effective Leaders and Effective Managers
Think: The sweet spot where strategy and execution align.
The Situation: This is the dream scenario—leaders with a clear vision collaborate seamlessly with managers who execute with precision. Roadmaps align with company goals, teams make smart trade-offs, and phased development delivers incremental yet meaningful results.
Your Role as a TPM:
Focus on managing unknown unknowns—anticipate risks and address them proactively.
Ensure that every decision made, from trade-offs to adjustments, is executed with clarity and alignment.
Push for phased, thoughtful delivery that builds trust and momentum.
Here, TPMs can focus on elevating their craft, working at their highest capacity in an environment where great things are possible.
Final Words
Regardless of the scenario, TPMs exist in the space between these forces. They rationalize the tension between vision and execution, alignment and misalignment. The work requires humility, adaptability, and a relentless focus on clarity and progress.
In this balancing act, Product Managers become your allies and co-pilots, helping you decode complexity and amplify impact. Together, you turn dissonance into harmony, chaos into order, and potential into results. Whether you’re dealing with the messiness of inefficiency or the bliss of alignment, your job remains the same: to ensure that what matters gets done, and that it’s done well.
Every TPM has their own story to tell about these scenarios. What’s yours?
Until next time.
-Aadil