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Program Manager’s Invisible Work
The organizational glue, the catalyst to successes, the person connecting dots no one owns, and so much more that can’t be named.
I have often been put in roles where teams either didn’t have a traditional TPM or had a mediocre one. So, as I have onboarded these teams, I have had an added responsibility to prove why TPMs are on their teams and what a TPM can do that they don’t already have. And this convincing streak has spanned across product leadership, executive leadership, and engineering teams. What makes this so challenging is that a TPM role, unlike another role, spans such a wide breadth that it is impossible to match one TPM to another, and the work done is often hard to quantify.
As someone who still struggles to quantify the invisible work as a TPM, I wanted to write some examples of what invisible work really means, which is one of the biggest pillars encapsulating TPM work.
Listening in on the meetings with eyes and ears. Listening is a skill that is rewarded regardless of career choice, but for a TPM, it is one of the gem skills. I trained myself to listen through eyes and ears earlier in my career, which meant listening to more than just words. It is listening to their body language, and noticing when their eyes do not match their words…
