#1: Is TPM a wicked learning environment?

Feb 07, 2023

How do we grow professionally in a TPM role? I once received this answer: "The same way top performers do in other areas: by rigorously practicing your craft." However, after turning to experts who studied top performers, I learned that it's not that simple.

Deliberate practice and Mental Models

I started by researching the works of K. Anders Ericsson, a Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who introduced the concept of "deliberate practice" through his extensive research on experts and peak performers. Ericsson studied elite performers in various fields, including sports, chess, music, and medicine, and found that the main difference between experts and novice practitioners is their mental representations.

In his book “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise” (2016), he outlines the difference between experts and novice practitioners in the following way:

The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.

What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations. Through years of practice, they develop highly complex and sophisticated representations of the various situations there are likely to encounter in their fields. These representations allow them to make faster, more accurate decisions and respond more quickly and effectively in a given situation. This, more than anything else, explains the difference in performance between novices and experts.

The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations.

In summary, peak performers differ from others due to specialized mental models developed through years of practice, leading to advanced memory, pattern recognition, and problem-solving abilities. Using deliberate practice will enable you to create effective mental representations much faster.

For TPMs, these can be mental models related to how technical programs are set up, how they notice signals that indicate risks to the program, or how the communication flows between stakeholders.

Learning Environments

Ericsson outlined two differentiators of deliberate practice from other practice types (1) the existing body of knowledge that established the best practices followed by experts in the field and (2) the availability of an expert coach who can provide personalized feedback.

Both are related to real-time, accurate, and actionable feedback that a coach can provide based on the body of knowledge. Ericsson argues that deliberate practice is only possible in such an environment where these two conditions are met, and you can establish a tight feedback loop. Expertise researchers refer to such domains as a kind learning environment, a concept first introduced by Robin Hogarth, a British-American psychologist, and professor in the Department of Economics and Business at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. In their 2020 book “The Myth of Experience,” Robin Hogarth and Emre Soyer describe it as follows:

The kind learning environment [is] where decision makers receive abundant, immediate, and accurate feedback on their actions, and the rules of the game remain largely constant. Under these controlled and limited circumstances, the lessons of experience are typically reliable.

In other words, the kind learning environment is a tightly controlled space with a limited number of variables, low-level or no ambiguity, and near real-time feedback for every action. It has a clear goal or well-defined success criteria and a reliable performance measurement.

Echoing Anders Ericsson’s examples of sports and music as areas where deliberate practice is possible, Hogarth attributes sports (e.g., cycling and tennis) and music (e.g., playing violin or piano) to the kind learning environment. To some extent, the pure software development process can be called a kind environment when approached correctly. The code either compiles and pass all the unit and integration tests or… it doesn’t – immediate feedback. Granted, you need to have accurate tests, to begin with. Product management is also, to some extent, a kind learning environment. Through A/B testing, you can check whether your feature is gaining user traction – near real-time feedback, which you can use to course-correct your actions. Software engineering and product management are not the kindest learning environments; both can have challenges. But on the spectrum, I consider them to be on the kinder side.

On the other side of the spectrum lies the wicked learning environment, where feedback is delayed, distorted, or inaccurate, if existent at all. In such environments, ambiguity, uncertainty, and variability are high. Missing evidence or a low signal-to-noise ratio (when you have to filter through tons of irrelevant information) can lead to subjective interpretations and overgeneralization based on limited information.

A classic example of a wicked learning environment is the stock market. In the recent past going through the turmoil of the Covid-19 effect on the markets in 2020 to the recession in 2022, many people reconfirmed that it is tough to outperform the market regularly. The complexity of the stock market is described by high variability and volatility. Even if you are deeply involved in a particular industry or sector, like the tech sector, you still miss a lot of information to make confident predictions about where the market will move next. Past experience is not truly helpful in this environment.

Does all the above remind you of a … technical program?

Ambiguity, uncertainty, and many other characteristics of the wicked learning environment make me think that TPM craft is on the wicked side of the learning environment spectrum. While gaining experience and growing your expertise in some domains, it is not guaranteed that it is transferable to other domains. Managing technical programs in the product domain does not immediately make you an expert TPM in infrastructure, and vice versa. “Irrelevance of past experience” or “missing relevant experience” are the critical points of the “Myth of Experience,” where Hogarth and Soyer warn us not to rely on experience blindly. The two questions they pose are (1) what is missing from my experience? and (2) what is irrelevant in my experience?

How do you grow in an environment where past experience and expertise might not be leading contributors to future success?

The answer is – to make your environment kinder and get closer to deliberate practice. As Andres Ericsson suggests in “Peak”:

If the field is one in which deliberate practice in the strictest sense is not possible, you can still use the principles of deliberate practice as a guide to developing the most effective sort of practice possible in your area.

The basic blueprint for getting better in any pursuit: get as close to deliberate practice as you can. It boils down to purposeful practice with a few extra steps: first, identify the expert performers, then figure out what they do that makes them so good, then come up with training techniques that allow you to do it, too.

Identify the expert performers.

Finding an expert performer in your organization can be tricky. In large or medium-sized companies like Amazon or Uber, you can look for existing TPMs and lean on collective knowledge shared at internal resources like TPM Conferences. In smaller companies where the TPM team is not well established, you need to see who plays the TPM role. That is most likely someone from senior engineers or engineering leadership. Observe what they do to lead organizations successfully through the change. As Ericsson emphasizes: “in many fields it is the quality of mental representations that sets apart the best from the rest, and mental representations are, by their nature, not directly observable.”

Build relationships with the experts you’ve identified, and engage in conversations to learn about their mental models – how do they think about things? What can you adopt and incorporate into your thinking? See if you can partner with or help them in something that will allow you to see them in action. In such cases, make sure you ask them about their thinking process, what is called think-out-loud protocol in scientific circles.

Create feedback loops

Making your environment kinder will also include building all the possible feedback loops. Proactively sourcing the feedback surrounding your technical program will shift your environment towards the kinder side of the spectrum. It can be the feedback from the point of view of the stakeholders, the leadership, the team operating on the ground, etc. The feedback can be about the clarity of the goals, the overall progress and performance of the technical program, and your performance as a program leader.

Be patient. Complex technical programs take time to complete. A delayed feedback loop in running such programs can be frustrating, but it is a part of the growth process. Feedback loops will allow you to monitor your outcomes in longer time ranges.

How do we grow together as a TPM community?

In the recent 3-4 years, more and more TPMs have been active on social networks like LinkedIn. We share our perspectives on how the TPM role differs from other roles, how to build trust with stakeholders, and what tips and tricks there are to lead the program. It is valuable, but more is needed to create a solid body of knowledge that the community members can use to outline their growth path.

I feel we are missing the stories of what led to people’s growth – what was the scope of the technical program, what were the challenges, and how did you overcome them? Creating a library of case studies and best practices will be a great addition to crowdsourced learning materials for TPMs. Of course, there are NDAs and other restrictions on sharing corporate information, but we can be creative and find ways to address them.

So, let’s open up a discussion:

What was the most challenging technical program you’ve worked on, and how did it lead to your growth as a TPM?

Key takeaways:

The difference between experts and novice practitioners is the quality and quantity of mental representations they have developed through years of deliberate practice.
Peak performers have highly specialized mental representations due to years of practice which gives them advanced memory, pattern recognition, and problem-solving abilities.
Deliberate practice requires a “kind learning environment” with real-time, accurate, actionable feedback, a body of established knowledge, and an expert coach.
The “wicked learning environment” has delayed, distorted, or inaccurate feedback and high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty.
Technical Program Management (TPM) is considered a wicked learning environment due to the high level of ambiguity, uncertainty, and variability.
To grow in a wicked learning environment, you need to strive to get as close as possible to deliberate practice by soliciting feedback, finding a coach, and learning from the experience of others.

P.S. Thank you for being the first subscriber to my newsletter. It is a new medium for me, so it will take a few iterations to find the right tone and topics. All your feedback is welcome! [see? feedback loops!]

Evangelizing the TPM Craft 🚀🎉

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