Becoming a Technical Program Manager: Navigating the Bridge Between Tech and Strategy
If you’ve ever found yourself straddling the line between wanting to code and wanting to lead, wondering if there’s a career that lets you stay technical without being glued to a keyboard 40 hours a week, then congratulations, you’ve stumbled upon the elusive role of the Technical Program Manager (TPM). It’s like being the conductor of an orchestra, except instead of violins and flutes, you’re managing APIs, sprint backlogs, and cross-functional teams that sometimes forget how calendars work.
If you’ve ever felt that you are too much in the weeds and want to embrace strategy over tactic, negotiate, engage and reach out across different interconnected nodes of a project, then you are looking at a TPM.
I’ve watched friends and colleagues like myself transition into TPM roles from engineering, project management, even product management, and every path looked a little different. Yet, all of them shared common threads: curiosity, technical know-how, and the ability to make complex projects feel less like a tangled ball of yarn and more like a neatly knitted sweater.
But how do you become one?
