Wearing the hat of an adjacent role

One of the common mistakes people make is to make their career path too rigid. Coming from a non-traditional educational background, I know firsthand that there are many ways to move through your professional life. In Chapter 1, I talked about the adjacent roles to the TPM and how they all overlap with one another. This is intentional (or at least keeping it overlapped once it was noticed was intentional) because it gives the organization many ways to scale itself. A team can get by for a time when an adjacent role is not filled. The company can also try different ways to organize these roles into teams to maximize the output of their teams. Your ability as a TPM to assume these roles affords you flexibility in your role.

The tech industry is in another down cycle at the time of writing the second edition. Not only have there been massive layoffs across the industry, but the top companies also joined in, which some hadn’t done in over...