Gatekeeping Engineering excellence as a TPM

A Technical Program Manager (TPM) assumes various responsibilities, including planning, execution, delivery and more. Another crucial role for TPMs is to maintain a keen awareness and be engaged in the overall operational and engineering excellence within an organization.

Most engineering teams are  busy delivering a defined and detailed Product /Technical roadmap which leaves less focussed time towards  operational health and Product quality.As a TPM who has oversight into the project implementations, we can play a pivotal role in enabling operational efficiencies at scale and fueling enthusiasm and accountability across the organization

Here are a few key insights I have gained from my experience collaborating with engineering teams leading the program execution and delivery of consumer and enterprise products.

Understanding Product/Site Health- Having a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the technical/business ecosystem helps to define, measure, and report critical health metrics that span across product/site health, customer issues, and developer productivity.  As TPMs, we can be effective change agents collaborating with engineering leaders, our peers, and site reliability engineers (SRE) to uplevel operation excellence for our teams. While a project might end with a product ramp, the journey continues as we learn and understand the adoption, reported bugs, user feedback after the launch.  By partnering with product, customer support, and product operations teams, we can gather qualitative and quantitative insights on product and customer experiences, adoption, improvements, and hot spot areas in our product/technical landscape and feed them into the product/technical roadmap. Leveraging these partnerships, we can establish a structure and cadence to help drive accountability and results for engineering leaders to deep dive into issue trends, troubleshoot, address root causes, and prevent recurring issues. Bringing together engineering, product, and support operations teams establishes a valuable feedback loop, enhancing our operational efficiencies and ensuring a delightful customer experience.

Pursuing Continuous improvement in the organization processes - Our engineers are frequently involved in rotational oncall while working on project deliverables. It was insightful being involved in the oncall process to learn some of the challenges that the engineers encounter. Oftentimes the engineers just go through the motion of deployments/monitoring and it requires deliberate and conscious effort to understand and identify optimization opportunities. We should seek to understand if the teams have observability and monitoring tools/dashboards, identify any process gaps or friction, and check the availability of up-to-date runbooks to effectively support oncalls.  Working with the leadership to surface some of these learnings and getting the required support and attention  improves developer productivity and happiness and builds credibility and trust with the engineers. It proved to be a great opportunity to work with multiple teams,cross-pollinate learnings, and drive adoption of best practices across teams. 

Managing Technical Debt - Given the market and competitive pressures, most engineering teams face the urgency to deliver and ship quickly. TPMs must be cautious and pay attention to quick solutions, as these types of temporary fixes can accumulate and may pose risks to the overall stability of the system. It is crucial for TPMs to bring together the product and engineering teams to create awareness and understand the trade-offs, costs, risks, and implications associated with such decisions. Taking proactive steps, TPMs should collaborate with engineering leaders during quarterly planning cycles to identify and prioritize technical debt items and that investments are made towards reducing these debts, whether through architectural improvements, design enhancements, code refactoring, or test coverage.  Reducing technical debt can greatly improve the overall stability and operational health outcomes.

Trust and Security conscious- We all recognize the importance of Trust and Security for everything we build. During project implementations, the TPMs must guide the team to establish guardrails to mitigate data breach, address security vulnerabilities, and manage privacy and compliance requirements. We should look to collaborate with technical leads/architects and security/legal teams to thoroughly evaluate security risks across different layers of  technical stack and all related aspects during design/code reviews and testing. A TPM can be an effective champion to enforce best practices, and share insights across teams to ensure the security and protection of our data.

Lastly, it is crucial to acknowledge that establishing and nurturing an environment of engineering excellence within an organization requires support and sponsorship from leadership. Personally, being engaged in Engineering Operational excellence here at Linkedin has been an incredibly fulfilling experience that has stretched my boundaries and encouraged continuous learning. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Greg Pounds , Aarathi Vidyasagar , Erica Lockheimer , Janardhanan Vembunarayanan , Manish Baldua , Rahul Sule , Kunal Cholera , Jingwei Wu , Lin Xu ,  Dominique Monié , Michel Moriniaux , and Kiran Shivaram for providing me with valuable opportunities to explore and learn  and  also for their commitment in fostering and promoting a culture of engineering operational excellence within our organization.

This pursuit not only brings delight to our customers but also empowers our engineers to focus their efforts on delivering impactful results.