TPM Community 2024

Building on Last Year's Successes

Jan 23, 2024

As 2024 unfolds, I can't help but feel that it's shaping up to be the most prolific year yet for our TPM Community. The momentum has been building over the past four years, and 2023 laid a strong foundation for this. Jogging down memory lane, I realized that the last pre-pandemic, in-person TPM Meetup occurred just two weeks before the lockdown and the prolonged WFH for everyone. To be precise, it was on March 4th, 2020, at the Airbnb office, where I met Harman. Prior to that, we had events at Lyft, Meta, LinkedIn, Amazon, to name just a few. Several months into 2020, a few folks in the TPM Slack space (hi, Jen 👋) teamed up with Harman and me to kick off Virtual TPM Meetups. We hosted 3 to 4 events in 2021 and 2022.

At the end of 2022, the tide began to gain force. Josh published his book – "Technical Program Manager's Handbook" – the first book dedicated to the TPM Craft that I know of. Several other books quickly followed, from authors like Arpit Agrawal (TPM, Warner Brothers), Gitanjali Dua (author of TPM Interview Companion Newsletter), and a few others.

Around the same time James Dayhuff, the author of the TPM Craft Newsletter, published his course on Educative: "Technical Program Management: A Practitioner's Guide."; and I discovered Aadil Maan’s newsletter, "Building Romes: Technical Program Manager’s Field Manual," which had been going strong for a few years.

Early in 2023, several of us huddled to brainstorm the need for a full-scale conference, an idea that had been floating around in the TPM community for some time. After a couple of meetings three of us remained in the team: Josh, Josie, and myself. We began executing it. Before fully committing to the conference, we decided to pilot the idea – hosting our first hybrid TPM Meetup, where three of us met in person for the first time.

This was followed by a 6-month sprint of simultaneous planning and execution. We locked in the date and the venue and opened a call for speakers. We worked with vendors, volunteers, and speakers. The event proved successful by all measures. Read my TPM Summit 2023 recap here.

The year concluded with an invitation from Target for me to participate in a panel for their TPMs, alongside Dylan from GitHub and Michael from Celonis. Thanks for inviting me Vijay and Jayne. After the TPM Panel at Target, I also discovered that FootLocker has TPM roles, indicating the role's continuous growth in various industries.

Now, looking into 2024 – what is on the horizon?

More books are on the horizon!

Josh Teter is preparing for the 2nd edition of the TPM Handbook!

Priyanka Shinde, our keynote speaker at the previous TPM Summit and a TPM leader known for her work with tech giants like Meta and startups such as Cruise, has announced her upcoming book, "The Art of Strategic Execution." Stay tuned for the announcement of the launch date! If you're interested in attending a book signing event, please don't hesitate to send me a message!"

And last but not least, I am finally getting my writing piece together. Those who have worked closely with me already knew that for the past 5 years, I have been collecting TPM tribal knowledge, best practices, and my own observations and learnings into one giant Google Doc. 2024 feels like the right time to broadly release it to the public. The working title is my favorite motto: "Evangelizing the TPM Craft: Principles and Practices of Technical Program Management in Silicon Valley." I will write about it in more detail in the future, but in the meantime, you can sign up for the Amazon pre-order. Stay tuned and subcsribe!

More Events are coming!

With the group of enthusiastic TPMs who met at the TPM Summit, we kicked off a series of local events that I dubbed “TPM Trails,” since “All the Trails lead to the Summit!”, get it 😊 ?

Our first in-person event is happening on January 31st in Santa Clara, CA, titled 'Being a Hardware TPM at Meta.' There will be pizza and some exciting announcements. Don’t forget to register as the in-person capacity is limited! Kudos to Ozkan for leading the chapter formation and organizing the first event, and Kudos to Snehal, our speaker from the TPM Summit, for helping with this meetup!

We are also planning a virtual TPM Trails Meetup in Europe led by Michael Götz, and one in Seattle led by Doron Katz. Simultaneously, we are forming new chapters in the U.S. (Texas, Denver, New York), as well as in India (Bangalore) and Canada (Toronto)

Bay Area Event Calendar: https://lu.ma/tpm-trails-bayarea-ca?k=c
Seattle Event Calendar : https://lu.ma/tpm-trails-seattle-wa?k=c
India Event Calendar: https://lu.ma/tpm-trails-india?k=c
EU Event Calendar: https://lu.ma/tpm-trails-europe?k=c

And, of course, the TPM Summit 2024! We decided to keep the same venue, so I am working with the Computer History Museum to lock in the date in October 2024. We are brimming with new ideas to make the event even more practical and impactful for everyone. Stay tuned (or subscribed!)

Evangelizing the TPM Craft 🚀🎉

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