Learn

👨‍🏫 The Psychology of a Great TPM: 4 Core Principles

No child grows up dreaming of becoming a Technical Program Manager.

Honestly, it’s a role that doesn’t have a strong magnetic pull against the other mainstream career paths like engineering or product management.

It seems like to me that there are a common set of base beliefs or attributes of most TPM’s. There is still diversity within the groupings of TPM’s, but many of us likely align in very fundamental ways.

I believe there are a set of core first principles when it comes to the Psychology of a Technical Program Manager that are common across most all of us.

It is less of a job description and more of a psychological profile.

So, I ask you, what makes a great Technical Program Manager tick? What behaviors help these TPM’s “win” in the workplace?

Consider these questions when looking

• Are you willing to run towards chaos?

• Are you able to flex and bend in ambiguity?

• Do you find joy in working behind the scenes helping others?

• Do you get a thrill from structuring the unstructured?

Hard skills are learnable by most anyone. But behaviors? Those are hard to learn. Those are the differentiators between the mediocre and the great.

Let’s consider 4 Psychological Principles of great TPM’s that enable them to behave in a way that helps them win.

Psychological Principle 1: Context Craving

Any great technical program manager craves the full context of a project or program. We examine how a project fits in from multiple angles:

• Seeing the through-line of a project as a strategic business driver

• Reading the political shifts around the project

• Understanding the technical systems and components that make it possible

• Diving into the data that support or disprove hypothesis around the business and its operations

We want that bird’s eye view.

Not for the ego-trip of becoming an all-knowing TPM, but because our brains thrive on mental completeness. It’s that same feeling when a puzzle is complete and you can see how all the pieces fit together. It just feels good.

Context is everything to us as TPMs because context brings clarity. Clarity drives outcomes. Outcomes are what make the difference.

To become a great TPM, Crave Context: gather it, build it, spread it.

Psychological Principle 2: Embracing Ambiguity

Technical Program Managers are not intimidated by ambiguity. We embrace it.

Every single project has varying amounts of ambiguity. It is inevitable. We know it isn’t just part of the job, but there’s a part of our brains that light up when we face ambiguity.

It’s like being dropped in the middle of the woods and having to find our way out. There is a sense of adventure, danger, challenge, and survival. Our brains react in a way that allow us to embrace ambiguity with focused energy and optimism.

For some strange reason, we run towards the chaos and ambiguity in search of a thrill to drive clarity and context.

To become a great TPM, Embrace Ambiguity: run towards it, dig into it, enjoy it.

Psychological Principle 3: Emotionally Calibrated

If you’ve made it this far in the article, you may be looking at the first two principles and wondering how to reconcile them.

• On one hand, TPM’s crave context!

• On the other hand, TPM’s embrace ambiguity!

Simultaneously being able to Crave Context and also Embrace Ambiguity is one of our psychological superpowers.

This co-existence of the first two principles leads to the third: emotionally calibrated.

TPMs often absorb emotional friction from and between other functions. It is rarely appreciated how often we “make it work” between teams and organizations that may have far from perfect relationships and interactions.

This means that no matter the highs or the lows of any project, we as TPM’s are that steady anchor. We manage risks, but we also celebrate wins. We don’t just make plans, but we investigate morale across contributors.

This makes TPMs effective stabilizers throughout the lifecycle of any project.

To become a great TPM, be emotionally calibrated: celebrate wins, mourn the losses, but stay as steady as an anchor.

Psychological Principle 4: Systems for the People

We may think and communicate in Gantt charts, but we thrive on human nuance and relationship.

There’s something about people that makes us love the job of being a TPM (and this very same fact is sometimes what makes us hate our job as TPMs!).

But we’re wired to think about people, at scale. TPMs love frameworks, retros, and Jira dashboards…but we love them because they help humans work better together.

We’re system builders and soft skill nerds.

Ultimately, our inner drive is to make progress easier, for all the people, at scale.

To become a great TPM, prioritize people: build relationships, design human-friendly processes, run programs with kindness.

Wrap Up: Why This Matters

The best TPMs aren’t just doing a job. They’re satisfying a deep internal urge to fix, connect, align, and uplift.

They are exemplifying behaviors that help everyone around them win.

These are the psychological patterns that perhaps represent the underlying wiring that gives us our superpowers.

So I ask you again, what makes a great TPM tick?

I believe it is a quiet but unrelenting need to bring order to complexity and momentum to teams.

📧 What makes you tick? Or what other behaviors do you believe make a great TPM? This definitely isn’t the end-all-be-all for high performing behaviors! Feel free to reply to this email directly with your own thoughts!

Note: This post was inspired by the book, The Psychology of Money. This is a book that has always helped me think differently about money: less on the math and more on my behaviors with money.

That pattern of thought got me thinking about the psychological principles and behaviors of a great TPM.

People

🤝 Doron Katz, Host of the TPM Ridge Podcast

Doron is a Staff Technical Program Manager at Walmart. I’ve had the privilege to meet and chat with Doron on a few occasions! He has a passion for the TPM craft and recently has been publishing tons of great content and resources for TPMs!

(Oh and he’s also the host of the TPM Ridge Podcast!)

Definitely connect and/or follow him to expand your network of amazing TPM’s.

Here’s one of his latest articles on Production Readiness.

Sharing is Caring

🎁 Are you enjoying this newsletter?

Share this free newsletter with anyone you’d like, or simply just post it on LinkedIn if you’ve found value in it.