Following up on my post about writing personal weekly summaries, this post explains how you can scale the process to your entire organization. In doing so, you create a “pyramid of radical candor” that directly combats insular communication.
But wait, there’s more! If you have reasons to share your org roll-up externally, the leader of that org can filter the document to make an external version. Pyramids within pyramids…
This is especially valuable if you are in a remote environment or in an organization where different roles report to different leaders. This mechanism maximizes communication flow and minimizes your time spent in status update meetings.
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.
Read the post for the links to freely use the ladder guide yourself!
Here we are – this is it! Drumroll please 🥁…the post where I debut a framework to make a ladder guide for any role in the tech industry! But when I say “I,” I don’t mean just mean myself. I want to introduce and heap praise upon my former coworker and now coauthor of this post, Bryan Zug. It is only thanks to him that we have this open source framework that you are free to use!
Read more for templates to use and instructions on how to use them
In the tech industry, if you really want a role to exist at a company, you cannot avoid what is likely the most ubiquitous and simultaneously most hated tool in the entire industry: the ladder guide.
What is a ladder guide? Whether you have people in a role already or are looking to hire your first, you want to be sure that those in the role are setup for success. You want to be sure that you are hiring the right people for what you need. You want to be sure that the people hired will be happy and worth the expense of hiring them. And as per my last post about pay bands, you want to be sure you are paying people the right amount.
Do you now see why we all have a love-hate relationship with ladder guides? We hate them, but we need them. The list of questions goes on, but a ladder guide is a tool to help answer these questions.
Click in to learn more about how to create a ladder guide!
After my last post, I’ve had multiple conversations that got into the weeds of how these moves work at larger tech companies. I quickly realized I needed to address a particular gap – that of pay bands – when I saw this comment about the Instagram consolidation of PM and TPM:
“To be fair, if a TPM at Meta moves into a PM role, they’d be getting significantly more in compensation.”
This comment hit close to home, as I worked at Meta for ~3 years and experienced this truth first hand. But I’ll get into my personal experience shortly – first, allow me to explain some context.
Most tech companies work such that every role has their own pay bands. This means that no matter how similar roles are, people in two different roles at the same level may be paid different amounts on average. While this maximizes flexibility to pay what the market demands for each role, it also comes with a host of problems.
As TPMs, we are often asked to provide regular status reports on ongoing projects and programs. While sharing personal weekly summaries may avoid the need for formal status reports, there are differences between the two that different situations may call for. That said, one should not assume that a recurring status report is necessary for every project! Rather, think through the overall communication strategy for a project and consider if status reports make sense within that – they often do!
This post defines a best practice around status reporting, starting with first evaluating if status reports are a good fit for your situation before then sharing how to source the content and format your report.
When I last wrote about what to do instead of quarterly planning, I did not mention the word “budgeting” once. While everything said in that post is true, to dismiss budgeting leaves a huge gap that has to be addressed. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires that publicly traded companies file both quarterly and annual reports on an ongoing basis. While financial forecasts are not a part of these requirements, it has become the norm to do so. In order to provide more accurate financial forecasts, most publicly traded companies adopt a budgeting process. However, budgeting only tells one half of the story: spend. To get the other half – revenue – you want to understand projected product and feature releases with associated revenue forecasts. This gives you both sides of the coin for your overall financial forecasts. However, it leads to the conflation of budgeting and planning, and creates a game to be exploited no matter how you slice it.
As Technical Program Managers (TPMs), we often end up as meeting note takers. While TPMs are not just stenographers, note taking is a valuable exercise, and thus taking notes is something to be encouraged. It is OK for note taking to be TPM led, as we often are the best suited to distill down complex, cross-functional, and cross-organizational topics. However, the reality is note taking is meant to serve a purpose, and all meeting attendees should be encouraged to partake in their own way to ensure maximal value of the exercise.
This lightweight post simply defines a best practice around collaborative note taking, where the note taking responsibility is shared across all members of a meeting.
When I shared my post about the value of writing weekly summaries months ago, I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I had a follow-up on it. Well, here’s the first follow-up on it!
An article that I was reading the other day triggered the inspiration for this post. While I struggle with many articles written by people without direct experience, I want to highlight a particular part of this article: “[Atlassian VP] Dean pushes Atlassian employees to keep 50% of their day open for individual-focused productivity.”
This quote spoke to me, as 50% is exactly the target I held myself to in my first two years at Zillow. Why this target? I made it up; it felt right for me as a TPM. While you are free to adjust the target, perhaps for other roles or levels – just don’t let picking a target get in the way of you getting started.
And what medium did I use to track this? Well, my weekly summary, of course!
So…how does one get started? If you look at your calendar, it might make you feel sick right now 🤢. Well, there’s good news! We all start here, and this is why this post is necessary. Even better news: you already did step 1.
As a follow-up to a previous post “Please, Stop Quarterly Planning: It’s Just Waterfall in Disguise,” I want to share what to do instead. I touch on this at the end of that post, but it felt worthy of its own, more detailed post. For details about why I don’t like quarterly planning, see that first post. But if you want solutions to replace it with, well, this post is for you.
So, what should we do instead? Two things:
1. Embrace a more flexible planning process, such as Kanban (just-in-time), and
2. Drive accountability through recurring business reviews every 2-6 weeks.
With these two things, you transparently cover the desired feedback cycle that quarterly planning provides while remaining truly agile. In other words, you create a simple, sustainable two-step flywheel. Let’s break these two components down.
