Where are the Technical Program Manager blogs? Unlike other domains such as Product Management or Program Management, there are only a few Technical Program Manager blogs

Use blogs to keep up with fast-changing tech

One of the easiest way to stay up to speed with the ever-changing world of technology is to read blogs. But the strange thing about blogs for technical program managers (TPM) is that there’s barely a handful in English. In fact, there are only five websites (and that’s being generous!) that covers intermediate or advanced topics. The rest focus on basic topics: what do TPMs do, what’s the difference between TPMs and product managers (or project managers or program managers), how do I become a TPM or interview questions.

Intermediate technical topics that are faced after you start working as a TPM such as designing entire systems or achieving deep understanding of models and software systems are not available as blogs. And advanced topics dealing with best practices, new tech and creating even more value for engineering and science teams such as improving quality of training data for machine and deep learning models or rapidly achieving human level performance is not even covered. In fact these are topics that tend to be blogged by other job families, primarily data scientists and applied scientists.

I’ll provide my analysis on whether the reason for this is because there are less TPMs than other xM roles (project or program or product managers) or some other reason at the end of this blog. You can easily find blogs that cover the basic topics by googling so I’ve left them out of this list. For now, let’s jump into the only five blogs I could find that cover intermediate and advanced topics. The top five are stack ranked in terms of the number of posts with the best at the top.

1. Mario Gerard

Website: www.mariogerard.com

Content Level: Basic – Intermediate – Advanced

This is the best TPM blog in terms of both quantity and quality of posts. The blogger is a principal TPM at Oracle in Seattle who covers both the basics – interviewing, differences in job roles – as well as contemporary industry topics (intermediate and advanced) that needs to be covered once you land that covered role.

His intermediate topics deal primarily with understanding concepts: reasons for moving to the cloud or mental frameworks such as user experience maturity models. Examples of advanced topics he covers are building resilient micro-services and IaC (Infrastructure as a Code). He also has a podcast that has some very prominent people such as a VP at Amazon who started as a TPM.

2. Inabia AI

Website: inabia.com/media

Content Level: Intermediate – Advanced

Inabia is a consulting company based in Redmond, WA that added an AI blog in 2020. In addition to the placement of consultants – project and program managers (technical and non technical), software engineers, testers – they also have a software development arm that specializes in deep learning computer vision applications for mobile and the cloud.

Their blog posts are geared for leadership, management and front line workers (product and technical program managers) interested in understanding how to rapidly improve their artificial intelligence models. The blogger, Nazeer Ahmed, is a TPM living in the Seattle area and works for Amazon.

3. Medium

Website: medium.com

Content Level: Basic – Intermediate

Medium, founded in 2012, is an online publishing platform where anyone can post their blogs about any topic. As a result, it has some basic and intermediate blog postings about interviews that provide some intermediate insight into being a TPM at places such as Facebook. They also charge a modest subscription fee of $5 per month. It’s worth it for some of the data science posts but definitely not worth it for the TPM posts. This site is here on this list because there really isn’t a lot of intermediate blog posts for Technical Program Managers.

4. Educative

Website: educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview

Content Level: Intermediate – Advanced

Normally, a site like educative would not make the top five list for TPMs. That’s because this site is like Udemy and sells courses. However, Grokking the System Design Interview, has several case examples that are free and show how to design an end to end system like an Uber app or Twitter.

These skills are very useful especially after you start working as a TPM even if you never finish the paid portion of the 31 cases. They provide a good structured approach for looking at software systems managed by engineering teams that you’ll have to support once you start a new role. While some TPMs are technical enough to design software architecture for engineers to implement, that’s a nice to have: that task is best left to the SDMs (Software Development Managers).

It’s better for you to understand the architecture and follow implications of new design. For example, will a change from a NoSQL db to a wide-column db like Cassandra result in a latency impact to read and writes? Strongly recommend spending at least ten hours going through the free case examples since that helps you once you have started this role. Additionally, this course teaches you to be the second pair of eyes and a partner for SDMs and engineers when (not if) design changes occur for the system you support.

5. AIM Consulting

Website: aimconsulting.com/insights/blog/what-does-a-technical-program-manager-do

Content Level: Basic – Intermediate

AIM is another consulting company similar to Inabia. Their TPM blogs revolve around case studies of what their consultants have done for other companies. It is an interesting read since they provide tidbits of information around their projects. This site would get a higher ranking if their case studies were more detailed.

Why aren’t there more TPM blogs?

So now we come back to the question we started with: why aren’t there more TPM blogs? Why are there barely three blogs on even intermediate topics? Aren’t there enough TPMs? Do these roles have such little knowledge to add that there’s no reason to have blogs to cover anything new other than deal with interview questions? Or are TPMs just so busy they don’t have enough time to write on anything but really basic topics? Or do TPMs keep up with the fast-changing pace in tech with on-the-job experience? Or are the mix of project/program management blogs and the software architect blogs good enough?

Let’s address the first question of how many TPMs there are compared to the other job families. So how many project managers, program managers, product managers, technical program managers and data scientists are there in the world? And how many of them are in the U.S.?

Source: LinkedIn searches of people (Jul 2020)

A quick search on LinkedIn by region shows some interesting info: yes, TPMs have consistently the least numbers in multiple regions i.e., whether you look at worldwide numbers by country (U.S. or India) or by tech hub (San Francisco Bay area or the greater Seattle area). But in the U.S., there are 2.5 M people holding that title on LinkedIn: let’s assume that almost everyone who holds any of these positions keeps their title correctly updated and are active. Yes, it’s a lot of assumptions but let’s use these numbers as a proxy metric to indicate how many there are.

So in the U.S., there are more Project Managers than Program Managers, more Program Managers than Product Managers and more Product Managers than Technical Program Managers. But, TPMs are only half as many as Product Managers. So they should have half the blogs of Product Managers. But no, TPMs only have 5% of Product Manager blogs (PdMs have 70+ blogs in English). Interestingly, there are almost double the number of Project Managers to Product Managers and yet the two roles have almost the same number of blogs.

Look at the number of data scientists in the U.S. There are barely 500 K of data scientists and yet they have only slightly less blogs than project managers. And even though both project and program managers (non-technical) have less technical topics to dig into, they still have over 60+ blogs. So it’s definitely not because of a lack of technical content or even the numbers of people with that title as shown by the minority of data scientists with blogs. Even looking at reddit communities, i.e., subreddits, all those roles are represented but NOT TPMs.

So the answer to the question “where are the TPM blogs?” is:

• I don’t know.

Kinda anti-climatic, I know. But this is one post that I’m hoping one of you can answer. It’s definitely not because there’s not enough TPMs as shown by how many fewer data scientists there are and yet there are both 50+ blogs and thriving subreddits. And it’s not because of a lack of technical topics since even non-technical project and program managers have a thriving blog presence of 60+ English blogs.

Looking forward to hearing your ideas.