- The TPM Craft
- Posts
- TPM Promotions & Manager Partnerships
TPM Promotions & Manager Partnerships
Effectively partner with your manager to build an agreed upon promotion plan
James Dayhuff
October 24, 2024
In partnership with
(7 minute read)
👋 Hey TPM Crafters, let’s get crafting.
This newsletter edition is focused on the Career management
What’s inside?
👨🏫 Learn: TPM Promotions & Manager Partnerships
📚 Resource: The World’s First Open Source TPM Ladder Guide
Learn
👨🏫 TPM Promotions & Manager Partnerships
Do you ever feel like the path to promotion is a constant uphill battle? I know I have.
Over the past few years, I’ve faced some of those struggles, but I’ve found an approach that works. It’s helped me get promoted twice, most recently to Staff Technical Program Manager, and I’m here to share it with you today.
A Failing TPM Career Matrix
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with a highly competent Senior TPM about her struggles with getting promoted.
She’s delivering on strategic, high-impact initiatives, regularly interfaces with the C-suite, and is one of the most experienced TPMs in her organization. Yet, despite all this, she’s hitting roadblocks in her efforts to move up. The root of the issue?
In our conversation, she shared frustrations about how useless the TPM Career Matrix is to her in being able to advocate for herself.
The company’s TPM Career Matrix is failing its purpose, and it’s making it unnecessarily difficult for her to advance.
It lacks clear, specific criteria, making it difficult for TPMs to understand what’s required for advancement.
It isn’t respected by other roles, leading to a lack of credibility and consistency.
It fails to set a standard for TPM excellence, leaving employees without a clear path to growth.
A well-designed TPM Career Matrix should be a clear, objective roadmap for growth. It guides TPMs in their development, sets the bar for excellence, and earns respect across the organization. When done right, it empowers TPMs to see exactly what it takes to reach the next level and gives them the confidence to get there.
Be Collaborative, Not Critical
At first glance, it might seem like the best approach is for this Senior TPM to point out the issues with the TPM Career Matrix and propose improvements directly to her manager.
But addressing the problem head-on like this isn’t what I would recommend
Doing so might lead to a longer, more difficult path to promotion. No one wants their career growth delayed, especially when navigating conversations about promotions can be high-stakes and delicate.
So, how would I approach this?
Instead of confronting a manager with a list of issues (especially if they helped create or maintain the current matrix), do this: focus on building trust, clarifying the ambiguity around career growth, and positioning yourself as a collaborative partner, not a critic.
Tackling this problem takes a measured sense of empathy, along with a delicate mix of confidence and humility.
In this situation, your manager is your greatest ally. You need their support and advocacy, not just agreement. But securing that support requires more than simply pointing out flaws—it means building a partnership.
This approach (fostering trust, clarifying goals, and partnering with my manager) was exactly how I navigated my path to Staff Technical Program Manager over the past year.
Let’s explore how you can shift the conversation to build alignment and pave the way for your career growth.
Framing The Promotion Conversation
As with any effort you engage in as a Technical Program Manager, one of your first goals is to create clarity from ambiguity.
Step 1, TPM Career Matrix: Get a copy of your company’s TPM Career Matrix.
Step 2, History: Write down the programs you’re running and highlight your big wins over the past 12 - 18 months. Start with simple bullet points and then see if you can transform them into compelling narratives.
Step 3, Future: Write down your targeted goals over the next 6 - 12 months within the scope of the program’s your involved in today.
Step 4, Cross-Reference: Begin cross-referencing your History and Future with the existing TPM Career Matrix available to you. Highlight areas where you feel there is ambiguity, and also areas where you may be delivering as expected (or above!)
Step 5, Share Intentions: Your manager can’t help you if you never tell them what you want to achieve. You need to state your intentions, or your why, behind wanting the promotion. Help your manager see your intentions. Your goal should be to make it easy for your manager to become your ally in this journey to promotion.
Step 6, Get Clear: Once you’ve stated your intentions for the promotion, you can now have a clarity conversation with your manager to validate what it takes to get promoted.
Example Promotion Conversation
Let’s take a look at a way this conversation (steps 5 and 6) may happen.
The outcome of this conversation (or series of conversations) is to have an objectively agreed upon plan with your manager to hold both you and your manager accountable for the end result of a promotion.
(One of the base assumptions in this conversation is that you have at least a somewhat reasonably healthy relationship with your manager. There are obviously some edge cases where managers may be harder to work with.)
You: Hey boss, I’ve been thinking a lot about where I want to take my career lately. I would love to walk through my thoughts with you and get some feedback. You are a valuable partner to me in my career growth, so I want to make sure we’re on the same page.
Manager: Very cool, let’s chat about it! I’m glad you’re thinking about this.
You: Thanks, it is definitely something important to me. The reason I’m interested in promotion is because it is an objective measuring stick that I’m improving at my job as a TPM. This type of measurable growth is important to me and definitely gives me motivation when I can see that progress. I’ve been a Senior TPM for about 2 years and I believe I have a growing case to become a Staff TPM, but I need your feedback and partnership to make it happen. I’d like to cross-reference my history here, future goals, and our TPM Career Matrix to get alignment on where I’m at relative to my next promotion.
[aside: above, we’ve communicated growth intentions with the manager]
Manager: That’s a good way to look at it, and I want to support you in that growth. I think that’s a fair way to look at the promotion evidence. You have been a reliable Senior TPM. Let’s take a look at what you had in mind.
You: K, let’s first look at the 5 core attributes our TPM Career Matrix highlights as the core measurements of promotion based on my historical efforts. There are 3 of them that I feel confident I’m over-delivering. They are X, Y, and Z. In this doc, you can see the historical deliverables and big wins that I think prove valuable evidence for those. However, there are 2 of them that I feel like are ambiguous. I drafted how I interpret these in terms of specific deliverables which may speak to the objective, but I’m really eager for your feedback if I’m interpreting these correctly.
Manager: Those are valid points, your performance has definitely been meeting expectations if not exceeding expectations in those areas. The 2 areas of ambiguity are interesting, let’s take a look together.
[aside: …..additional detailed conversation…]
You: I really appreciate your feedback on this. Confirming my high performance in a few areas is definitely awesome to hear. After talking through those other 2 areas where it was a bit ambiguous, it seems like there’s an opportunity to update the TPM Career Matrix to better reflect expectations for other TPMs. I can send a draft over to you later this week on how we can phrase the expectations for those areas a bit better. What do you think?
Manager: I agree, those 2 areas were fairly ambiguous. I would love your help to draft up some improvements.
You: Awesome, I’ll put that on my list for this week. Now I’d like to validate another piece with you: my future goals. I want to partner with you to make sure what I’m involved will satisfy any gaps we talked about already. For example, I’m working on Project Alpha where I’m interfacing with the CTO on a bi-weekly basis and the overall project is expected to have immense business value. My goals for this project are [X, Y, and Z]. Do you think those goals, if achieved, will continue building a case for promotion in the next promotion cycle?
[aside: this is where true partnership with your manager becomes powerful as you align on expectations tied to actual contributions]
Manager: Those are really great goals, especially X and Y. But for goal Z, that isn’t quite something that matters as much in a promotion case. Instead, you should consider a goal B which would actually build a stronger case for your promotion.
You: That’s a good point, I didn’t quite see that perspective when I was setting my goals. I can adjust my goals to include goal A and deprioritize goal Z. This is really really great to see the promotion effort from your eyes. Thank you!
[aside: this conversation could go on to explore various goals and alignment efforts]
Promotion Conversation Principles
The above conversation is merely an example and vignette of how you can frame the promotion conversation. In reality, this isn’t a single conversation. It is a series of conversations with regular check-ins and adjustments over time.
Let me pull out some of the major principles I attempted to communicate in the example above:
Partnership & Trust. Explicitly call out the hopeful partnership with your manager to build a case for promotion. If you rely on implicit communication for this, the manager may not fully feel the on-going ask to move your career with you.
Questions. Identify key questions you can ask your manager. You want to go into the conversation with an open mind and ready to see the promotion effort from your manager’s eyes. Make sure you seek to understand the promotion process as well, don’t just assume your manager makes all the calls for this.
Confidence. Show up with confidence! If you have been performing or over-delivering in various areas, don’t be shy to share that. At the same time, give your manager room to give feedback on their relative amount of alignment with your impact.
Goals & Business Impact. Your goals provide evidence that you’re ready to be promoted. The more that you’re goals are directly aligned with business impact, the easier it is to justify a promotion. In most mid-to-large tech companies, your manager will have to advocate on your behalf to the organizational leaders. If you put your goals in terms of business impact, you make the advocacy job of your manager way easier.
Shared Expectations. Remember, this is a major goal of having these conversations. Even if the TPM Career Matrix for your company isn’t ideal, you can craft a shared plan with your manager through conversations like these.
Not Selfish. It isn’t selfish to strive for a promotion, but it may come off as greedy if you aggressively push for a promotion when you haven’t yet helped your manager build the case for your promotion.
Recap
A broken TPM Career Matrix can make getting promoted challenging, but it doesn’t have to hold you back
You can overcome these challenges by partnering with your manager.
Start by expressing your intentions, setting clear goals, and testing them against the existing framework. Regularly check in on progress to ensure you stay aligned. All of this is to be done within a relationship of trust and collaboration.
In the meantime, continue driving high-impact projects and expanding your skill set. That way, when the right opportunity comes along, you’ll be ready for it.
Don’t Measure Your Life By Promotions
Remember, promotions are not the measure of success for your overall life. They are a single data point to be taken in consideration with a much broader perspective of health, stability, family and friends, hobbies, etc.
YOU ARE MORE THAN YOUR JOB. YOU ARE MORE THAN A PROMOTION.
You are a human being with much more infinite worth. I wanted to close on this note to keep help keep things in perspective.
A word from this week’s sponsor…
Unlock Windsurf Editor, by Codeium.
Introducing the Windsurf Editor, the first agentic IDE. All the features you know and love from Codeium’s extensions plus new capabilities such as Cascade that act as collaborative AI agents, combining the best of copilot and agent systems. This flow state of working with AI creates a step-change in AI capability that results in truly magical moments.
Resources
📚 The World’s First Open Source TPM Ladder Guide
If you don’t Straker Carryer in the world of Technical Program Management, you’re missing out.
Straker is a thought-leader TPM currently working at Zillow where he was a key influencer in establishing the TPM practice there. His own blog is filled with awesome posts that go beyond the world of TPM-ing.
Earlier this year he published an open source TPM ladder. This ladder does a really great job setting up an opinionated stance on how to measure critical skills and progress through 5 levels of TPM seniority. Check it out below.
