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 and instead focus on your ability to bring success through others. By growing the careers of the people that report to you, their contributions grow, and the collective contributions of your team grow. The difference in the paths is the composition of your team as well as your mobility upward. Each company is different, but this is true for the Big Five companies that I interviewed for this book. As you will see in an example later, companies outside of the Big Five, or really any of the top tech companies, have their own progression route that may not differentiate between these two people manager paths.
The journey of a people manager can bounce between both SDM and TPM manager. Let’s take a look at the journey of a people manager that held both of these roles.
Faheem Khan is a senior manager TPM at Amazon. Throughout his career, he has been both an IC as well as a people manager in various forms. He started out ambitiously co-founding a start-up, Planetsoft, in India and found quick success with requests to build out enterprise solutions. He realized he needed to learn how enterprise software was created before committing to do so himself, so he got a job at a tech firm as a software tester.
When finding an issue, Faheem was driven to get the right people together to solve the problem. This tendency promoted him to test lead, where he moved to Seattle to work with Microsoft. He first shifted into people management as a Software Test Manager to build out the test framework used by Expedia. He enjoyed working with the users and stakeholders while building the framework. Faheem switched to the TPM job family to learn about business while still being close to technology at Expedia. He grew into a principal TPM, director, TPM, and then director of technology and managed cross-functional teams. He bounced back and forth between people management and program management. This back and forth led him to think about what he was best at and what he enjoyed doing. He decided that he was a leader of people and enjoyed project management in the technology space. Knowing what he wanted, he found a TPM management position at Amazon.
Faheem notes that whenever his career needed him to dive deep, he would take up an IC role so he could focus, learn, and hone new skills. Once those skills were present and he was ready to share and drive others, he would find a people manager role. This is an incredible insight and embodies both the breadth and depth of knowledge that is expected out of a TPM.
From both Oscar’s and Faheem’s journeys we’ve seen the hallmarks of what makes a great TPM. They exhibit a drive to see a project through to completion, a willingness to learn and help those around them grow, and a desire to dig deep. Even with these common traits, different paths were taken for each, and both held IC and manager roles, and each ended up preferring one path over the other in the end. Faheem’s insight that the type of role that was best suited for him depended on what he was looking to achieve rings true for all of us.
