The World’s First Open Source TPM Ladder Guide4 min read

Update: I have been updating the guide based on feedback I get. The last update was on October 3, 2024.

After my last two-part series about creating ladder guides, I finally have one for TPM! To my knowledge, this is the first ladder guide for TPMs available for use in an open and free way.

You might notice the time gap in between this post and my last one, but dogfooding is no joke (nor is home renovation which has taken a lot of my free time). I made a lot of updates to the last post based on my actual use of the templates and process provided. So, if you do this exercise yourself, you should expect to be faster than I was! But if you already read that post, go back and give it a fresh read given all of the changes. The templates linked there have also undergone a lot of changes, so refresh those if you’ve used them!

As per the instructions laid out in the last post, I have two components to share:

1. A narrative cover letter to introduce the role and be used for recruiting and cross-role understanding, and;
2. A matrix to be used for individual role clarity and promotion use cases.

While I am excited to debut this ladder guide, that does not mean I believe that it is perfect. Please, engage and give feedback, be it via commenting on this post, LinkedIn, or messaging me directly. This is something I would love to see the community take and evolve beyond what I lay out here.

You should just click the links above to see the ladder guide in full, but I will summarize the details below.

Impact Range

As a reminder, the “impact range” is essentially a more detailed version of the Career Progression Summary from the narrative cover letter:

Skill Definition

To summarize the ladder guide, I defined the following skills:

Craft Skills

1. Technical Fluency: While there are no coding expectations, TPMs are expected to be fluent in technical architecture and design within their scope.
2. Product Management: By blending their technical fluency with customer focus, TPMs set the direction of products within their scope.
3. Execution & Ownership (Project, Program/Portfolio, & Process Management): “Execution eats strategy for breakfast.” While both are ideal, planning and strategy without execution are a waste of time. TPMs are expected to follow-through and execute on their own plans and strategy.

Strategy

1. Technical & Product Strategy: Strategy compliments all Craft Skills, ensuring that there is an intentional direction and why behind all work.

Professional Skills

1. Communication & Collaboration: While a shared skill with others, TPMs are “best in class” communicators and collaborators, even early in their career.
2. Leadership & Culture: It is a core tenet of TPMs to influence without authority. While this applies to cross-functional members of a working group, it also applies to their own discipline. This skill is especially important in decentralized organizational structures.

Level Progression

This guide recommends 5 levels for the TPM role, mostly following Google’s naming convention of title adjectives:

1. TPM
2. Senior TPM
3. Staff TPM
4. Senior Staff TPM
5. Distinguished TPM

While additional levels can be added to support Associate or Fellow TPMs to add levels earlier or later in a TPM’s career, respectively, this is only necessary for a small percent of larger companies that tend to already have ladder guides for their roles defined. Note that this guide follows Senior Staff with “Distinguished” instead of “Principal” like Google given the large number of companies that use Principal instead of Staff (e.g. Amazon).

I defined the level progression across the skills defined above as follows:

Splitting into Multiple Roles

You might be thinking “OK Straker, but we have multiple roles instead of one consolidated one.” If so, don’t worry! What’s nice about this ladder guide is it gives you the tools you need to create multiple guides, where overlap is clearly and intentionally defined, as needed.

For example, if you wanted to have a Product Manager separate from a Technical (Product | Program) Manager (TPM),¹ you could split the Strategy skill up to tease apart Technical and Product Strategy. Then move the Product Strategy and Product Management skills to a Product Manager ladder guide. Then leave the Technical Fluency and Technical Strategy skills with TPM, and share the remaining skills (Execution & Ownership would move to a Professional Skill).

You could also choose to adjust the rate at which skills progress across the two if you had different expectations across the roles for the same skill. For example, you may not expect a Product Manager to own as much Execution as a TPM, and therefore it doesn’t progress as quickly. The point is, you have a baseline that you can modify to split this guide into multiple as needed!

For examples, see how I broke out TPM and a Product Manager (PdM):

1. TPM Cover Letter and Matrix
2. PdM Cover Letter and Matrix

Appendix: Additional Examples

Since making this post, other guides have been shared with me that are also open. So, maybe this wasn’t the “world’s first,” but to me that’s not what’s important. What matters is I tried to find these and didn’t. So, I’d like to help with discoverability in my own small way! Huge credit to Zhanat Abylkassym for sharing these:

1. Dropbox Engineering Career Framework – TPM: this is so cool. I had no idea Dropbox open sourced all of their ladder guides!
2. IT Program Management Career Path Guide: US Office of Personnel Management 
3. Career Paths for Federal Program and Project Management Guide
4. TPM Primer: A group of TPMs got together in a Discord and made this intro to TPM which ends with a lightweight matrix guide at the end.

Footnotes

1. Again, I like this regex notation; (Product | Program) means pick one. ↩︎