Last Friday, I had the opportunity to chat with Srishti Bhatia in a 1:1 donut chat. (I like donuts better than coffee 😅 )

We covered some fantastic topics, it would've been fun to turn it into a podcast for others to listen.

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Topic 1: Agile vs agility

🤔 When is Agile more harmful than helpful?

Srishti and I have shared experiences of observing the challenges of implementing Agile at-scale. We talked about the need to aim for agility, instead of Agile. This can be tough in a large corporate environment when management and executives are asking for Agile! Ultimately, agility at-scale is more important than running a prescriptive framework.

💪 This is where the creativity of a technical program manager comes into play: solving for scaled alignment and execution strategies fit for the organization or company.

Topic 2: Technical Depth

👾 How technical should a technical program manager be?

Sometimes its easy to think that in order to be a "technical" program manager, you have to be a master of all-things system design. This line of thinking forgets about actual career and personal growth.

Its my opinion that a junior program or project manager can be "technical" if they understand two base concepts:

(1) how code gets from a developer's laptop and into production (ie SDLC)

(2) the basic architecture of a web or mobile app (front-end, middle-ware, data layer)

From there, begin to learn system design principles and try building something yourself.

Topic 3:

📈 How do you put together a decent growth plan as a TPM?

We generally talked about a few key themes with career growth as a TPM: Knowing the right skills to focus on, understanding how to expand the scale of your impact, and learning how to build relationships.

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Ultimately, it was a rich and engaging conversation. Thanks Srishti! What else did we talk about that is slipping my mind??

Another day, I'll send out a new link for sign-ups to have a donut chat for 30 minutes on Fridays.