Mario Gerard: Hello, and welcome to the TPM podcast with your host Mario Gerard. Today, we have a very special guest with us, Priyanka Shinde. She has extensive experience as a TPM. She's worked as a TPM, a TPM manager, several organizations like cruise autonomous, Facebook and Meta. And she has over like 20 years of experience in the tech industry. She's also launched TPMify, which is a coaching and consulting organization with a mission to help TPMs and TPM organizations reach their goals faster. If you haven't checked out our blog www.TPMify.com, that's www.TPMify.com. You should definitely go check that out. It's got a lot of interesting content. She's been publishing a lot of great resources for TPMs. So do go and show some love. There aren't many TPM bloggers and people are contributing back into the community. So, the few of us who are there, I would love for all of you to go and show some love and check out her blog and all the other workshops she's trying to conduct. Priyanka and I are today going to try to discuss the various types of product manager technical and TPM product type of roles. I'm sure you've seen a lot of these roles coming up in job boards recently. And so, we're going to like try to decipher what the product manager technical role is and what the TPM product role is and how they kind of coexist. Welcome Priyanka, Welcome to the TM podcast. Could you give our listeners a quick introduction of what you've done, where you've been and your journey so far? Priyanka Shinde: Sure. Thank you, Mario, for having me on the podcast. It's great to be here. Yeah, and thank you for the introduction. Like Mario said, I have over 20 years of experience in the software tech industry across, you know, various type of technologies, AI, machine learning, AP tech, education tech. And so, it's been a really journey. I did start out as a software engineer and then transitioned to the TPM role because I really enjoyed kind of getting involved from like start to finish as well as just seeing kind of things come to life. And so that was my primary motivation of transitioning to TPM. And then once I became a TPM, I worked at startups. I worked at, you know, like big companies, like Facebook as well as companies like Cruise. And I really enjoyed kind of like the different aspects of what was being offered by these companies. But throughout these times, I kind of became more and more passionate about the TM role. So, you'll see me, that's why I write a lot. That's why I try to, you know, kind of really help back because I really feel very close to the TPM community. And I feel very passionate about building this strong TPM community because I truly feel that TPMS when leveraged correctly can make big impact on organizations. And I want TPMS to realize their own power, but I also want organizations to understand that that's my aspirational goal for us TPMS. What is TPM's role and why does the industry need a TPM? Mario Gerard: That's so well put, and you could probably do an entire podcast with Priyanka's journey of becoming a TPM because all of us have different journeys and different paths that we take it to get to where we are. So that's kind of a real interesting journey to, you know, maybe decipher one day. But okay. Let's start with, today's like first question to Priyanka. Like Priyanka what do you think the TPM role is like decipher that in your own words, like what the TPM role is and why does the industry need a TPM? Priyanka Shinde: Sure. Yeah. So, the TPM role or the technical program management role, I feel is a very special role in the sense that it has so much of that technical focus while leveraging your core program management skills and leadership skills. Sometimes I'd say, you know, TPMS drive holistic execution strategy by leveraging their deep domain expertise to basically meet the goals or deliver results, right? That's the end goal. And so, I feel like, you know, the industry has moved on from like program management or, I mean, we still have program managers, but the TPM role, I feel came more into prominence over the last maybe couple of decades because of the technological advancements that we are seeing in the products, right. Products are becoming more complex. Now you have, you know, you don't have kind of like single screen things or website it's now, you know, like I can talk about autonomous [04:15 inaudible] all day long in terms of complexity, right? Yeah. And so, what that does is that you now, you know, you cannot just have coordination, facilitation, tasking, all of those are still important, but by having some of that technical expertise and domain knowledge, you actually elevate your program management skills. So that's why I feel like the TPMs kind of is a role that has kind of evolved as well as gain more prominence in the last couple of decades. What skills do you think TPMs require? Mario Gerard: Yeah. I'll add a little bit to that. Like the complexity of the programs have gone up so much and there's so many teams that own separate confidence and do any complex program. All these teams need to get really well and interact so much that the need for somebody to step in, it could be a TPM. It could be an engineering manager, it could be anybody with different titles, but the role they're trying to play is trying to bring these teams together to accomplish the final goal of the program. And that's where you've seen the technical program manager role kind of blossom the last decade as Priyanka said. What are the skills do you think TPMs require? Priyanka Shinde: Yeah, so of course, you know, we talk about technical, like the team TPM, largely, so you of course need the technical or the domain expertise. And that can be based on whatever background you have, or you can build on it, right. Or you can continue to like to evolve based on if you change domains. But besides the technical skills, you need strong program management skills, right. Something you just said, Mario, who is we have to be able to work with multiple teams. Like it's a highly cross-functional role. And so being able to kind of have all of these balls up in the air, knowing which team to go to for what, and like managing all of this, the ability to see big picture and look around corners like, that to me, is very, very important in the TPM role. Related read: Meta TPM Interview Guide Besides that, I think TPMS need to have really strong communication, both written and verbal, right? We are to be working with a lot of different teams. We work all the way from our peers, other teams, that partner teams, as well as leadership and executives. And so, we need to be able to communicate exactly what we are seeing in a way that kind of brings confidence, but also provides clarity to our audience. And finally, like we need leadership skills, right? TPMS are there, they're influencing without authority. We hear that, right. We are working again with multiple stakeholders. We have to build relationships. We have to motivate these teams. We have to manage the conflicts. Like there's so much of all these people skills involved here. And it is a core part of this TPM role as well. So, I say those are the core things in terms of skills. Communicating at different levels within the organization - What does a product manager do? Mario Gerard: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely, communication is so important. Like we talk a lot about communication, but at the same time, unless you are a TPM and you've been in a role like that, you don't understand the value of communication, how succinct you need to be sometimes. How you need to communicate at different levels within the organization, as you just mentioned, and the leadership skill, I think you called it a few, right? Like influencing with that authority is so important. Building relationships is so important. Motivating teams, as Priyanka said, super important when you don't have a team reporting to you, especially, right. This is completely like influencing without authority. And it's so key, if you think about TPM skills. Let's switch gears and move to the product manager role, because we're going to be talking a lot about the TPM product and the product manager technical role. What does a product manager do and what is, his or her role? Priyanka Shinde: Yeah. So, you know, sometimes there's so many ways to define what the product manager role. And of course, we have a product manager here. They might say something. So, I'm going to kind of try and frame it the best I can without, I mean, I did kind of played a part product part program manager role at one point. But you know, of course in a lot of times when, even from a TPM perspective, we say, oh, product managers mainly define what, right? They are identifying significant opportunities. They're driving product vision, strategies, roadmaps in the context of like the broader organizational strategy and goal. They, of course, you know, in corporate data, research, market analysis to inform their product requirements and the priorities that they want to make. And of course, in all of this, you know, they're defining requirements, they do this in collaboration, of course, with research, design, engineering TPM. And so, you know, sometimes even in small teams or startups product manager may do their own research, right. Or build their own wire frames or even like execute. This is where we start seeing overlap in responsibilities. But kind of that's how I think about it is like PMs are defining the what in a nutshell, and then the TPMS do when and the how a little bit. So that's kind of my take on the product manager responsibility. What do you think are the skill sets, the PMs possess? Mario Gerard: Yeah. We also, I think from a product perspective, they also probably do a little bit of the why, like what and why, right. It kind of goes hand in hand of doing like, why are we doing this,
