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👨‍🏫 Book Review: Evangelizing the TPM Craft

When I write these newsletter posts, I often imagine writing to my past self 3 or 4 years back in time. I ask:

What advice or guidance would I give to myself as a young-er Technical Program Manager?

Initially, this was because there weren’t that many resources out there about the role of a Technical Program Manager. I wanted to begin building a series of articles to act as a paper trail for anyone else going on a similar TPM journey.

In terms of books, there wasn’t much (if any?).

I had collected a series of Program Management books, Product Management books, and System Design books. This was my informal research approach as I navigated the unknowns of being a TPM. But ultimately, I was left wanting a better form of mentoring and coaching in the form of a dedicated TPM book. It just wasn’t there. And I certainly wasn’t ready to write on myself.

Fast forward to today.

Good news: the situation is not the same!

A Growing Pool of Resources

Across the TPM Community, we’ve got a growing collection of fantastic books to choose from. Here are at least 4 that come to mind:

• Technical Program Manager's Handbook: Unlock your TPM potential by leading technical projects successfully and elevating your career path by Josh Teter (2nd revised edition launching soon!)

• The Art of Strategic Execution: Finding Success in Technical Program Management by Priyanka Shinde

• The Technical Program Manager's Guide: Navigating the Path to Success by Arpit Agrawal

• Evangelizing the TPM Craft: Principles and Practices of Technical Program Management in Silicon Valley by Zhanat Abylkassym

There might even be a few more (none of the links above are sponsored).

A lot could be said about all these books. Most recently, I’ve been reading the last one linked there, Evangelizing the TPM Craft by Zhanat.

He has created such an valuable resource for the TPM Community. My past self would’ve been thrilled to have this level of depth and breadth to guide my efforts and career path as a Technical Program Manager.

I want to share with you what I found so incredibly valuable in his book. Let’s jump in.

Zhanat’s Book is Wildly Comprehensive

Right off the bat, you should know that this book is very comprehensive. Consider these key questions that are answered by various portions of the book:

• How do TPM’s fit into engineering orgs?

• How does the TPM role compare with partner roles like engineering manager, product manager, project manager, and even a non-technical program manager?

• How can a person transition into the TPM role?

• What are the expectations of TPM’s at different levels of seniority?

• How should I effectively structure my TPM resume? and what should I expect in interviews?

• What does it mean to be a technical program manager? (this was one of my favorite parts! Zhanat over-delivers in this section)

• What exactly does it look like to drive a program as a technical program manager?

• What does it mean to manage as a technical program manager?

• How do I intentionally grow as a TPM?

• How do I influence without authority?

• How do I manage conflict?

Wow. Look at those hard hitting questions. And that’s just scratching the surface.

There is absolutely no room in this post to go through each of those sections, so I’d like to share 3 of my favorite highlights.

3 of My Favorite Highlights from Evangelizing The TPM Craft

Highlight #1

When I started my TPM journey, I was under the false pretense that the ideal TPM situation is to walk into a well-structured project to run, I’d run it, and everyone would be happy.

I had many, many wake-up calls before I truly began to see the job of a TPM for what it really is.

As humans, our brains naturally resist ambiguity and chaos. The natural reaction is to be stressed with ambiguity and chaos. Solving for ambiguity and chaos are hard problems.

As a Technical Program Manager, you get thrown into ambiguous and chaotic situations all the time. The fundamental acknowledgement that this is the job helped pivot my paradigm years ago.

While everyone else scrambles, frets, worries, and stresses…the TPM is there to be an anchor, a guide, and navigator to calm waters.

You are there because of the ambiguity and chaos.

In essence, you are this dog:

But great TPM’s don’t say “this is fine”.

They say “this isn’t fine! But eventually it will be fine. Here’s our path to exit the building or put out the fire”.

Once you understand and embrace this, you’ll be able to see how to be a great TPM much more clearly.

Highlight #2

In this section, Zhanat over-delivers in shedding light on what it means to be a technical program manager.

Here’s what I mean when I say he over-delivers:

• Zhanat gave example after example of how technical aptitude helped him have incredible impact as a TPM in Amazon, Uber, and Robinhood. These examples are extremely illuminating.

• Zhanat dives into the history and evolution of foundational technologies that have led us to the current state of system design. For example: history of the internet, history of WWW, history of RPC, history of gRPC and microservices. I was especially thrilled about this because I’ve written a similar message about why understanding system design through a historical context is so crucial.

• Zhanat explains the basics of system design, really well. Topics like scaling, availability, load balancing, and more.

Honestly, I’ll be revisiting this section again. Since it is highly technical, I know that another read through will reveal even more useful things I missed the first time.

Highlight #3

Zhanat’s take on “how to influence” is unique and useful. He anchors much of his research of influence on the law of reciprocity and the origins of that practice going all the way back to ancient greek culture.

He takes it a step further with framing reciprocity and influence with tangibly-explained currencies. Here are some of the currencies that act as ways we influence via reciprocity:

• Inspiration-related currencies: motivating goals that provide meaning to work and leads to greater motivation.

• Task-related currencies: enabling a person with the right assets or capabilities to be successful with a given task.

• Position-related currencies: boost a person’s standing within the organization with indirectly better enables them do accomplish their goals.

• And more…

Ultimately, I feel like Zhanat pulled off a super difficult task: he effectively took a very soft-skill and turned it into a very tangible and actionable point of leverage to better influence without authority as a TPM.

Get the book!

Honestly, if you’re a Technical Program Manager then you should have this book on your shelf. It reads like a TPM mentor is speaking directly to you.

Zhanat, you’ve outdone yourself. Great job.

This is not a sponsored review. It’s just a really good book.

A word from today’s sponsor…

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Events

Don’t forget — The TPM Summit is happening in 1 week!

Hear from incredible speakers from top companies such as:

• Jen Krieger: VP of Engineering Operations @ GitHub

• Lyly Ly: Sr Dir of RnD Operations @ Shopify

• Aman Bawa: Sr. Dir. TPM @ Salesforce

• Jane Chiu: Engineering Chief of Staff @ Coda

You can attend in-person or remotely.