BA 31/52: TPM Team Topology, Pt. 3
Congratulations! You now have a TPM. šš½
You have taken your first step towards some eventual team of TPMs designed around a specific topology that you will adjust and improve based on your organizationās scale and growth needs.
You even know how you plan to deploy this TPM extraordinaire. Horizontal or vertical - you have decided. āGood jobā as my two year old likes to proclaim.
Itās Day 1 - so, what are the marching orders? Here are some guidelines I have learned and experienced in my years as a TPM.
Horizontal TPM Playbook
Your focus is the project, not the teams.
Your mission is to assess, identify, formulate, activate, repeat solutions to cross functional issues in ongoing projects.
Your expertise is bringing the various systems of work from any number of teams together towards achieving the project goal.
Your accountability is to your manager and the leadership but your primary trust building are the individual team managers and engineers on the cross-functional project team.
You will roll out processes to help bring order to the chaotic energy generated by cross functional teams at the project level, not the team level. Generation escalation paths, schedule check-in milestones, document project progress at the org level, etc.
You will teach the agile mindset to the leadership, not the engineering teams. How? Help them focus on getting comfortable with replans, quick decision making and realization that no matter how short your sprint is, without the right org strategy and vision, no amount of agile will save you or make things ship faster. Before the teams become agile, the leaders must be agile first. Teams can come next.
You will help cross functional teams from polar sides to come together like design and engineering work better together.
Vertical TPM Playbook
Your primary focus is the teams, secondary is the project.
Your mission is to assess, identify, formulate, activate, repeat solutions to individual team level issues in ongoing projects.
Your expertise is identifying opportunities to improve your engineering teamās system of work.
Your accountability is to your manager and the primary engineering manager/leader you support but your primary trust building are the individual engineers on your engineering team and adjacent TPMs.
You will roll out processes to help bring effectiveness and predictability to your engineering team.
You will teach agile mindset to the your engineering team. How? Help them focus on deploying agile the right way not through orthodox adherence to a specific methodology but by identifying opportunities to ship daily, plan weekly, strategize monthly, dream yearly. Sprint planning, retros etc that will come through trial and error, like muscle must be developed overtime.
You will help your engineering team work more effectively with cross functional teams.
Why should I care about this?
This is by no means an exhaustive list; but you can see the broad strokes in the playbook rules outlined above to help you get started.
As you hire TPMs, you cannot expect them to succeed if you cannot clarify what their mission is.
Hiring TPMs and then telling them ādo agileā or āwe need agile, make it soā is not setting them up for success.
Focus the TPMs expertise and energy on the āright thingsā.
Use these broad strokes playbook outlined above to develop a 30-60-90 day plan that the TPM can follow.
Over time you should improve, add, remove, and do whatever to continue to build these playbooks because this will become the guide for all future TPMs who join your organization.
Until next time šš½!
-Aadil
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