All Summaries for The Technical Program Management Podcast & Interviews

Mario Gerard: Hello, and welcome to the TPM podcast with your host Mario Gerard. Today, we have a very special guest with us, Rhea Frondozo. She and I have worked together at Oracle cloud infrastructure team OCI. Rhea has been a tech industry for the last 20 years. She's worked at IBM for eight years, Microsoft for fours, EMC square. And then at OCI for six years, she's had a variety of different roles as well. She's been a developer, a program manager, a test manager, engineering manager, a director of TPM, and right now, is working at Salesforce as a senior director of TPMS. Her specialty is to run large scheme programs. Rhea, thank you for joining us today. And why don't you introduce yourself to our audience to our audience? Rhea Frondozo: Thanks Mario. As you mentioned, I have had a 20-year run in the tech industry working for several of the top tech companies in a variety of different roles. But what I found is that I’ve always been most interested in working on large scale complex programs and products after trying out so many different roles at different companies. What I now know is that my passion tends to be working on projects that aren't so much consumer facing in terms of features or products or services, but more on, so solving enterprise level infrastructure challenges. I find that the problem solving I enjoy most applies to cross-functional technical challenges that typically span multiple products, services, or even processes. Mario Gerard: Fantastic. Rhea and I actually have worked together at OCI. As I mentioned, we've been on the same team I’ve reported to Rhea where it was so much fun. We've actually solved so many large-scale programs or problems, which turned in programs and I’ve learned so much from her. So, I think this is going to be a very interesting podcast. So how we have designed today's podcast is the first section. We are going to just go over some very fundamental TPM questions with Rhea. And the second half of the podcast, we're going to go very much into the details of how you've run a large-scale program. So, let's start with the first section, right? So, Rhea, how would you describe the TPM function? Rhea Frondozo: So, the TPM function I have to say is not a very easy one to describe because it typically is something that varies from company to company and organization, to organization, team, to team. It's a newer function I think that has a blended role within many organizations. So, if you can imagine at the base, you have the project management or program management responsibilities, then you apply that to some kind of technical project, program process that needs to be solved for. And so, it also can vary tremendously depending on seniority level. And so, the scale at which you operate can be very small and narrow, more depth focused If you are a depth TPM, or it can be very large and crosscutting across entire organizations or entire companies, if you're looking more at the breadth TPM role. Mario Gerard: And what would you say are the core skills TPM should generally have? Rhea Frondozo: So, at the most basic, you know, skill that I would expect TPMS to have been first and foremost, project management skills. These are just your basic project management skills around being able to define scope, a problem space, understand business impact, being able to identify key stakeholders and goals that you want to solve for as well as, you know, creating schedules and tracking execution. But outside of just your project management basic skills, the expectation would be that you have to have very solid communication skills. The ability to communicate both up down and laterally, whether it's your having conversations with Lee leadership, having conversations with team members, who you are giving direction to, or maybe peers or TPMS that you are trying to get to work on your project, who are maybe peers. Outside of communication Some other soft skills that I think are important are...

Mario Gerard: Hello, and welcome to the TPM podcast with your host Mario Gerard. Today, we have a very special guest with us, Priyanka Shinde. She has extensive experience as a TPM. She's worked as a TPM, a TPM manager, several organizations like cruise autonomous, Facebook and Meta. And she has over like 20 years of experience in the tech industry. She's also launched TPMify, which is a coaching and consulting organization with a mission to help TPMs and TPM organizations reach their goals faster. If you haven't checked out our blog www.TPMify.com, that's www.TPMify.com. You should definitely go check that out. It's got a lot of interesting content. She's been publishing a lot of great resources for TPMs. So do go and show some love. There aren't many TPM bloggers and people are contributing back into the community. So, the few of us who are there, I would love for all of you to go and show some love and check out her blog and all the other workshops she's trying to conduct. Priyanka and I are today going to try to discuss the various types of product manager technical and TPM product type of roles. I'm sure you've seen a lot of these roles coming up in job boards recently. And so, we're going to like try to decipher what the product manager technical role is and what the TPM product role is and how they kind of coexist. Welcome Priyanka, Welcome to the TM podcast. Could you give our listeners a quick introduction of what you've done, where you've been and your journey so far? Priyanka Shinde: Sure. Thank you, Mario, for having me on the podcast. It's great to be here. Yeah, and thank you for the introduction. Like Mario said, I have over 20 years of experience in the software tech industry across, you know, various type of technologies, AI, machine learning, AP tech, education tech. And so, it's been a really journey. I did start out as a software engineer and then transitioned to the TPM role because I really enjoyed kind of getting involved from like start to finish as well as just seeing kind of things come to life. And so that was my primary motivation of transitioning to TPM. And then once I became a TPM, I worked at startups. I worked at, you know, like big companies, like Facebook as well as companies like Cruise. And I really enjoyed kind of like the different aspects of what was being offered by these companies. But throughout these times, I kind of became more and more passionate about the TM role. So, you'll see me, that's why I write a lot. That's why I try to, you know, kind of really help back because I really feel very close to the TPM community. And I feel very passionate about building this strong TPM community because I truly feel that TPMS when leveraged correctly can make big impact on organizations. And I want TPMS to realize their own power, but I also want organizations to understand that that's my aspirational goal for us TPMS. What is TPM's role and why does the industry need a TPM? Mario Gerard: That's so well put, and you could probably do an entire podcast with Priyanka's journey of becoming a TPM because all of us have different journeys and different paths that we take it to get to where we are. So that's kind of a real interesting journey to, you know, maybe decipher one day. But okay. Let's start with, today's like first question to Priyanka. Like Priyanka what do you think the TPM role is like decipher that in your own words, like what the TPM role is and why does the industry need a TPM? Priyanka Shinde: Sure. Yeah. So, the TPM role or the technical program management role, I feel is a very special role in the sense that it has so much of that technical focus while leveraging your core program management skills and leadership skills. Sometimes I'd say, you know, TPMS drive holistic execution strategy by leveraging their deep domain expertise to basically meet the goals or deliver results, right? That's the end goal. And so, I feel like, you know,