Technical Program Management 101

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What is technical program management?

Brian Chesky (CEO of Airbnb) recently wrote that if you were explaining program management to a 5 year old, he would say it's ‘managing the list of todos’. Technical Program Management is doing this for technical projects where the list of todos is complex, ownership is distributed and required coordination.

It is also useful to think of technical program management as to defining the who and when within large organisations. At smaller organisations, the who and when is handled by the engineering manager. This becomes more difficult when multiple teams get involved, so technical program managers help to figure out the ownership for the project, lead the project to success by ensuring there is a key schedule to ensure the project is delivered on time.

In this way, technical program managers are often described as engineering’s force multiplier. They help engineering organisations become more effective at delivering projects by bringing their skillset in how to lead complex, multi-disciplinary engineering projects that require coordination across many functional areas. They help to drive effective teamwork, communication and collaboration in environments where often the goals are ambiguous and yet to be defined.

Their project experience helps to see issues before they arise, and understand how to quickly solve them to keep the project on track. Due to their importance in large scale projects, they often become close collaborators with engineering leadership.

What companies use technical program managers?

Technical program managers have become a staple role across the technology industry at some of the leading companies. These include:

  • Microsoft - the first company to introduce TPM roles as an integral part of the development cycle.
  • Meta
  • Google
  • Uber
  • Airbnb
  • Instacart
  • … and many more

Many of these roles were not set up as part of planning the engineering organisation, but appeared due to a need to resolve the issues of co-ordination and planning complex problems. As a result, they appeared whilst the company was scaling. Many work off the rough rule of thumb of 1 technical program manager per 75 engineers.

How do people typically get into technical program management?

Technical Program Management is a field without a clear path in as a result of certification or university experience. Instead, it attracts those who like working on large projects with high levels of ambiguity and are technically focussed. This includes those from software engineering, product management, consulting, and QA.

For example, Emily Nava studied modern languages before earning a PhD in Linguistics. She started her career in the tech industry at the Twitter languages project Rosetta Stone. She loved the technology side of content, and became more involved in running technology projects. She progressed to be a TPM at Twitter and then Amazon. She’s now building out a TPM team from the ground up at MainStreet.

In general, most people transition into TPM roles with an internal move rather than externally moving into the industry.

What are the typical salaries of technical program managers? As of May 2023, according to glassdoor, the average base pay for a technical program manager is £73k, with a range of £47k - £116k.

However, the more tech focussed Levels.fyi has the median total compensation as £102,759, with a range of £79k - £164k.

This difference is likely to reflect being within the tech industry versus wider roles in the UK industry for technical program managers.

What can be some of the challenges with being technical program managers?

  • Role definition - often the role of technical program manager will look very different at different companies. As a result, it is often challenging for TPMs to start their role and define what they are responsible for, and there can be different expectations across engineering leadership.
  • Empowerment - technical program managers are usually across large projects with many senior stakeholders. A key challenge is getting the empowerment to make decisions to help the project progress.
  • Influencing - often there are many stakeholders who have competing demands, and the TPM needs to ensure their project gets delivered against the other demands - but not to the detriment of the company as a whole! This balance requires emotional intelligence, business finance knowledge and program management expertise.

Where can I find technical program manager roles?

Program Hire posts the best Technical Program Manager and Delivery roles, handpicked for being excellent companies to work for. See them here.

If you would like further reading, please take a look at the following fantastic articles:

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