Situation
In late 2023 in GitHub With a starting point of clear role expectations, and clear goal expectations, we can make decisions about how to adapt.
As the leader of TPM at GitHub one of my strongly held beliefs, loosely held, was that TPMs should not be doing project work unless it’s part of a program.
In reality, stuff happens and we need a short burst of focused energy around specific problems. TPM to the rescue! But we’re fully committed to a portfolio of programs. Options:
- Say no? No.
- Yank someone off their important program and stick them on an important project.
This happened several times and was VERY disruptive
Behavior
- Created a dedicated team of three TPMs called The Flex Team.
Impact
Critical projects were staffed withing minutes-to-hours, with systems and processes being in measurably better shape within days-to-single digit weeks.
The Flex Team handled several high urgency, high importance projects in the 6 months that it was fully funded. The projects included responding to an urgent security issue requiring the involving a large number of team at GitHub. The issue was resolved rapidly due to TPM coordination across hundreds of Hubbers across tens of Engineering and Product teams.
We learned something: the types of issues that came up repeatedly turned out to be areas of underinvestment. So over time we spun up dedicated programs for those areas –security, availability, scalability–and the Flex Team TPMs transitioned to full-time leaders of those programs.
I responded rapidly to the immediate need, and seamlessly addressed the longer-term need. Urgent projects transitioned into sustainable programs.