Is A Technical Program Manager The Right Career For You?
TPM Role Explained: The role of a technical program manager is to oversee the delivery of technical projects, combine tech expertise with leadership to guide development teams, ensure alignment, and meet business goals efficiently.
Start Your Journey: To become a technical program manager, you need a mix of technical and project management experience and a background in software development, engineering, or business analysis.
Competitive Salary: A technical program manager can make between $130,000 and $210,000 USD on average, depending on the industry, your level of seniority, your location, and the size of the company.
Interview Prep: To prepare for potential TPM interviews, practice answers to questions on system design, risk mitigation, and stakeholder communication, and gather examples that showcase your technical knowledge, decision-making, and problem-solving.
To be a successful technical program manager, you'll need a sufficient degree of technical expertise to have street cred with your staff, leadership and management skills to be good at managing others, and the business savvy to communicate with executives.
In this article, we’ll cover how you can carve out a career as a technical program manager, what skills you need to succeed, and what you can expect as you move up the ladder.
What is a Technical Program Manager?
Simply put, technical program managers oversee technical project delivery. That means that the technical program manager role is responsible for keeping software development teams:
- Aligned on key decisions
- Accountable to team, project, and company goals
- Executing high-quality work in an efficient manner
Program Manager vs. Technical Program Manager
Program managers should possess leadership skills and have the business savvy to be able to execute complex cross-functional projects. TPMs also need these skills, but you'll bring an additional layer of technological expertise that lets you engage with software engineering teams on the details of project execution.
But, wait, you may be wondering—don’t program managers also require a degree of technical fluency to be able to engage with their stakeholders? I would argue that, yes, that’s also true. So what qualifies a program manager as a TPM?
I typically characterize a program manager as someone that knows enough to be “dangerous.” For example, they should be able to push back against a flawed engineering estimate and suggest an alternative solution.
As a TPM, you may have previous development experience and/or possess coding skills that lets you discuss and debate key architectural decisions for the product alongside the engineering team. A technical program manager brings a higher degree of technical knowledge than a program manager.
What Does A Technical Program Manager Do?
Now that we’ve explained the core responsibilities of a technical program manager, how does that translate into their day-to-day job functions? Here is a summary of TPM job duties and how they align to each of the core TPM skillsets of technical knowledge, leadership skills, and business acumen:
Technical skills
- Lead technical design and architecture discussions across cross-functional teams
- Oversee software requirements (including design, architecture, and testing) and hardware assets (system design, hardware selection, etc.)
- Manage through agile methodologies, such as Scrum
- Decipher the technical needs of other departments within the organization and translate them across stakeholder groups.
Leadership skills
- Act as a communications liaison between technical and non-technical audiences
- Develop and maintain productive internal relationships
- Facilitate cross-collaboration and understanding between IT and other departments
- Generate targeted reports for different internal and/or external audiences and update any internal project status report processes
- Stay current on the latest news, information, and trends about technical program management and your industry.
Business responsibilities
- Organize and track jobs, clarify project scopes, proactively manage risks, deal with project escalations, ruthlessly prioritize tasks and dependencies, and problem solve
- Meet specific business objectives and metrics
- Support the roadmap planning process
- Develop strategies and implement tactics to follow through on those strategies
- Solve complex business problems within allocated timelines and budget
- Represent company management to technical teams and vice versa
- Influence others across the company to remain focused on desired outcomes without direct authority.
As a program manager, you become more T-shaped; you’re not only focused on output, but focused on outcomes. Find the right altitude that you want to be sitting at. For example, governance. Do you have a standard way of working so that clients have the same experience project-to-project? Can you provide status reports to leadership and clients without being too much in the weeds?
What Skills Do Technical Program Managers Need?
A significant part of your job functions as a technical project manager will involve building and maintaining strong stakeholder relationships. Communication skills, including active listening skills, allow you to convey information to diverse groups of stakeholders across a variety of different formats, including translating technical information for non-technical audiences.
You'll also require emotional intelligence to work effectively across leadership and staff, particularly in environments where you might lack direct reporting authority and have to achieve project outcomes through influence.
Finally, you'll also benefit from critical thinking skills when solving complex business problems. These skills are important for processing and integrating information from cross-functional groups, thinking on your feet when interacting with stakeholders, and holding your own in a dynamic environment where few of your tasks may be repeatable.
What to Expect in a Technical Program Manager Interview
Technical project manager job expectations often depend on the seniority of the role itself and the size of the department or organization. Despite the potential variance, you should prepare to respond to the following types of questions:
- “Can you describe a time when you made a decision that affected the architecture of a system?”
- “Can you walk me through the process of designing an ecommerce platform?”
- “Share your best experience with regard to problem solving. What was your involvement?”
- “How would you define milestones and communicate them to stakeholders?”
- “How would you identify risk, and how would you mitigate it? What are the different ways of identifying risks?”
- “What would you do if a specific project is failing or if it won’t meet the deadline?”
- “How would you update 10,000+ servers in a real-world scenario without impacting the end customers?”
- “What are the important elements of each project phase?”
- “How would you kick off a new project?”
What’s the Typical Technical Program Manager Career Path?
Most technical program manager job descriptions stipulate a bachelor’s degree in a technical field, such as computer science (although some jobs are starting to move away from mandating these types of potentially exclusionary requirements).
Regardless of degree, you'll also be expected to have a technical background and both project and product management or new product development experience (or else a basic understanding). Some positions require in-depth knowledge of particular technology domains, while others give more weight to having a broad understanding of the tech world.
Despite the need for a broad understanding of business, it’s not likely that every organization would require you to have an MBA. Still, an MBA or a Master of Science in information technology is often preferred, as is a Project Management Institute certification (typically the Project Management Professional, or PMP) or another technical project management certification.
Here are some common positions that you might hold in your project management career path before becoming a TPM:
- Product manager
- Software or hardware engineer
- Engineering manager
- Program manager
- Business analyst
What’s an Average Salary for a Technical Program Manager?
As with other positions, your potential TPM salary will reflect the demands—and location—of the job. A salary survey by Levels.fyi shows that the national median salary for TPMs in the United States is $210,000 in total annual compensation.
Since Levels.fyi typically caters to big tech firms, such as Amazon, it’s worth looking at other sources for additional data points. Indeed puts the average annual base salary for TPMs in the United States at $142,000, while Payscale indicates it may be just under $130,000.
For more salary data on other project roles, check out our project manager salary guide here.
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