Authors: Andrew Hurst and Sudhakar RamakrishnanI’ve been liking using a road trip as an analogy for what we’re doing as a team. The long-term vision is the mountains in the distance. The car is the team, the driver is the leader (may be extended to many drivers depending on org shape).
You check your mirrors every 30 seconds or so. Speed every few minutes. Check the map every 10 minutes maybe (pre-google maps directions :), or even at rest stops. You assess your progress as to the goal at the rest stops.
You don’t need to know how you’ll turn when you get to the mountains, you can’t even see the roads there so it’s fully abstract. But in the next 2 minutes you need to know that the lane ends, that there’s a turn you need to make, and that you’re getting low on gas.
The Technical Program Manager (TPM) helps us understand how the car is running through building the dashboards, gas gauges, ensuring that we check the map and progress regularly. They’re ensuring the system of “get to the mountains” is working. They are like a GPS always recalculating for success the way forward. The product manager makes sure that the remote mountains are where we want to go. The tech lead ensures that our car will be built to spec when we hit the mountain roads. And the Eng leader ensures that all of it’s running together as a system.
Shifting gears prevents us from coming to a grinding halt. At times when you come across a steep turn, your car needs more power. So you change gears! The gear train is capable of switching the power, altering the torque and speed. Maintaining a team’s momentum is also about timing your gear shifts correctly and TPMs play a big role in helping teams’ shift gears.
If we imagine that we’re on a road trip together, occasionally we need to stop the cars at a rest stop, pull out the map, check progress against our goals, and argue over where we’re going to stop for food next (my favorite pit stop has dinosaurs, fwiw). Some work products TPMs help drive are like that, e.g. Quarterly Program Reviews are that rest stop for our teams. It’s a chance to get together, celebrate the wins, figure out if we’re on track, and talk about where we’re going next. Agreed, it’s a ton of work, but this consistently is one of the most useful series of weeks for the entire team and leadership to truly understand the state of our teams and products.
Think of middle-management as the clutch, where the employees are the tires and the executives are stepping on the pedal. If the executives keep stepping on the pedal and we're not going fast enough either we a) lose traction and burn out the tires, or we b) keep traction, moving slowly, and burn out the clutch. It’s important that we build in the feedback loops to ensure that the drivers know how the whole system is working, from engine, to clutch, to tires on the road.
Hope this analogy helps you connect with TPMs in your organization as they ensure major intra and inter organization projects are communicating effectively, making progress, and executing on an organizational cadence to ensure we're pushing in the right direction strategically.
Andrew Hurst is Vice President of Software Engineering, Modern Application Platform at VMware based in Palo Alto, California.
Sudhakar Ramakrishnan is Director of Technical Programs, Modern Application Platform at VMware, Palo Alto, California.
Such a nice analogy! Thanks for creating this, I'm going to use it to help people understand TPM's role in order for them to fully utilise their TPMs help wherever and whenever required.
ReplyDeleteheh, this post explains perfectly why TPMs and middle management think of themselves in such a lofty fashion
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