What's your day to day work involves today and when you started your career as TPM? Please share your experience running and administrating larger programs in newer or unknown areas of your functional expertise. Thanks!

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 included a bunch of products/services that required me to expand my expertise into. I still acted as a subject matter expert, providing guidance to my team on a day to day basis. Ensuring tighter alignment of my team’s goals was relatively easy and I had greater visibility into the progress my team made. Every day we’d be laser focused on solving our customer problems, there was lot of room to gets hands on.
• When I grew into an org leader with a team size of 35 to 40 people, my role gradually changed. I became the functional lead representing Technical PMs in my org’s leadership circle. My role spans 5 to 6 major product areas with ~1000 people cross functional teams. I need to be able to get a perspective on all aspects of the business (some areas where my team might not be staffed) and often rely on my own team leads to provide all the context. I spend most of my day today on the following (among many other things) -
• Setting and articulating the org level goals & priorities. Ensuring our teams understood how their work fit into the bigger puzzle
• Ensuring those goals (and any dependencies) are well understood by other cross functional teams (Eng, Design, Data Science etc) so that we can build strong relationships and collaborate well to achieve desired business outcomes
• Regular product/platform reviews with the teams to keep myself and the rest of the leadership informed on progress and ensuring alignment with org level goals
• Solving for any blockers on behalf of my team and the org
• Supporting my team well to ensure people’s skills are matched with the right opportunities (and priorities)
• Hiring and ensuring the new people on the team are set up for success

For the second part of the question, I’ll respond from an org/team lead perspective and focus on one trait that makes such programs successful. Since I work in Integrity (a.k.a Trust & Safety) there is a constant need to reprioritize my team’s resources to tackle new challenges and emerging risks that come our way. I ensure such trade offs are well understood by everyone. And often those challenges require us to set up large scale programs with significant east-west collaboration. When dealing with new or unknown problems, I’ve seen that strong Technical PMs typically get up to speed in a new or unknown area pretty quickly. While managing a program in such a problem area, my teams spends a lot of time communicating, with extreme clarity (context, problem, goals, solution, timeline, risks etc). That is the single most important aspect of managing such technical programs IMO.