AMA: Meta Director, Technical Program Management, Vasanth Arunachalam on Building a Technical Product Management Team

Expanding the team from 1 to multiple people comes with a set of pitfalls that I’ve learned the hard way. And many other factors such as Org culture, line of business, product lifecycle etc, have a telling effect on the type of pitfalls you’ll encounter, so take this with a grain of salt. Here are a few things worth considering - N degrees of separation: The larger your org grows, more layered your teams are (typically). Ensuring that you and everyone on the team feel connected to each other in ...Read More

Building with intent is key. As a first PM or TPM, you are often running a one-person show. You wear multiple hats and you tend to be scrappy, flexing to what the business needs you to do. That approach works wonders up to a certain scale but soon exposes its flaws. When you think about scaling out from there, here are a few things to consider - Understand your business (replace with org or product team) needs deeply, ideally the 1 to 2 year trajectory of where it is going. That’ll tell you what ...Read More

Prioritization is key. I don’t believe in dividing ‘all’ available work across my team. I believe in ensuring my team focuses on the top business priorities and are having the most impact. I typically encourage my team to do a few things but do those really well and not ‘peanut butter’ themselves across many different areas. A Technical PM on my team might be taking on multiple product areas (typically not more than 2), but they set clear expectations in terms of what their roles will be and how ...Read More

I love this question. Typically one does not boot strap their career as a Technical PM, at least not until recently (Some companies including Meta are hiring Technical PM interns now who start their career as a TPMs which is great). So the most common TPM career progression stems from Engineering, Data Science, Product Operations, Partner Solutions Engineering etc. I’ve seen so many people from those backgrounds be immensely successful as a Technical PM. And there are people with many more backg ...Read More

“Change is the only constant” is a cliched phrase in the industry but the reality is not far off in many lines of businesses. At Meta we often get to work with the best available information in hand and not afraid of pivoting when that information changes. That comes with a degree of ambiguity, churn and sometimes loss of motivation for the teams involved. As a leader, my role is to ensure the teams have a strong understanding of the ‘why’ and when priorities change, again communicating the ‘why ...Read More

For the first part of the question - I stared my career as an Individual contributor IC) and as you know that is all about specific product/platform strategy and top notch execution. I talked about the day to day of an IC in my previous AMA. When I transitioned to a manager role with a small sized team, it was all about scaling myself through my team. I was still accountable for a specific product area (M&A, Backend services for an OTT platform, Business Integrity Enforcement etc) but it inc ...Read More

I’ll try to answer this question to the best extent possible because I havent worked at a company that had formal SCRUM master roles. My understanding is that the SCRUM master focuses on ensuring the team and the individual team members are set up for success (via daily stand ups, educating on best practices, conflict resolution, project tracking etc). In today’s world, I believe these are skills that everyone should possess (PM, Technical PM, Engineering Lead et al). That’s how Meta operates an ...Read More