Understanding the modern TPM

In the 1967 book, The Technical Program Manager’s Guide to Survival, by Melvin Silverman, the author defines a program as an organization created to accomplish a specific goal. This organization was a group within a company that existed for this sole purpose and was to be dissolved once the goal was realized. You can see where the computer definition of a program gets its origins – a bit of organized code that executes to accomplish a task! Once the task is complete, the program would terminate.

I found Mr. Silverman’s book while attempting to uncover the origins of the TPM role. What I found is similar to the evolution of the word program. As it turns out, Silverman’s book was one of the first books that used the term technical program manager, though it only shows up on the title page – the rest of the book just talks about program managers. Elsewhere in the 1970s and 1980s, the term pops up in various United States government papers, listing someone as the TPM for a given project at NASA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense, to name a few. This had me perplexed, as I couldn’t see any role or definition that was recognizable as those of today. So, since Mr. Silverman defined program, I found the definition of technical in the Oxford English Dictionary:

technical (adjective). 1. relating to a particular subject, art, or craft, or its techniques, and 2. of, involving, or concerned with applied and industrial sciences.

What we commonly refer to as a TPM —where technical denotes a background in computer science—is actually just one of many instances in which the term technical denotes using a specialization.

As far as the technology industry is concerned, I identified the use of the term TPM at least as far back as 1993, though I suspect it has been in use in the industry as long as the industry has existed given its prevalence in other industries from the 1960s onward.

Old title, new meaning

While researching the origins of the term TPM, I utilized Google’s Ngram Viewer, which indexes word usage in books and government publications by year between 1800 and 2019. Using the Ngram Viewer results as a starting point, I researched dictionary definitions, half-century-old books, and US government publications from NASA, and found that the TPM title has been around for a while. However, as I’m sure many readers are thinking, it feels as though it’s a very recent addition to the workforce. I remember when I was first approached to interview at Amazon for a TPM role, I was confused as to what it was. I asked, and sure enough, it was roughly what I was doing professionally but the company I was at simply didn’t use that term. In fact, very few companies seemed to be using the title in 2013 – let alone the 1990s!

Figure 1.1 shows the Google Books Ngram Viewer results for “Technical Program Manager” from 1955 through 2019 in the English (2019) dataset with smoothing set to 3. This graph was generated via http://books.google.com/ngrams with these settings:

Figure 1.1 – Google Ngram Viewer results of the occurrence of the term “Technical Program Manager” from 1955 to 2019 with a smoothing of 3

Figure 1.1 shows that there is a very large uptick to the highest vertex for the term TPM in the year 1995 – the early days of the World Wide Web and the mad dash of startups rushing towards the year 2000. With these technology companies sprouting up, the need for specialized program management arose – people with a background in and knowledge of the systems being developed so they could be better facilitators and drivers of these new programs and websites. As is the case in the technology industry, trends that start within the few companies at the top slowly make their way down through the rest of the industry until they become common. In some cases, this trend is still working its way down in the industry, as some companies are still not fully aware of the position and its benefits. I believe this explains the lag in the term being seen in publications and more commonly used in the industry.

Now, here we are today with a title used to denote a specialized form of program management being wholly taken over by the tech industry to mean a program manager with a background in computer science or engineering – thus, an old title and a new meaning.

We’ve explored a bit about where the title of TPM originated outside of the tech industry and its transformation into a specific type of specialized program manager. Next, we’ll review the fundamentals of a TPM.