Exploring the people manager path

For TPMs, the people manager path goes in two directions for most companies in tech: SDM or TPM manager. Both of these paths switch focus from individual contributions to the company’s success to team-based contributions. As such, it focuses on your ability to bring success through others. By growing the careers of the people who report to you, their contributions grow, and the collective contributions of your team grow. The difference between the two paths is the composition of your team as well as your mobility upward within that path. Each company is different, but this is true for the TPMs I interviewed from the Big Five companies. As you will see in an example later, companies outside of the Big Five, or really any of the other top tech companies, have their own progression route that may not differentiate between these two people manager paths. Beginning in 2023 or so, there has been a trend in some companies to remove the TPM Manager...